


your ghost (i will gladly bear)

by palmviolet



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: (this has little to do with the plot but it's a fact), Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Beetlejuice References, Big Bang Challenge, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hopper is trying his best, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Joyce is the best mom, Lonnie is an asshole, ghost!Joyce, the Byers are Jewish, this delves into the mystery/crime solving genre a little too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:55:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21874021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/palmviolet/pseuds/palmviolet
Summary: “you asking yourself if i’m real?”he stared at her. “little bit, yeah.”this had to be some mix-up. coincidence, mistake, maybe he was hallucinating- but then again, his teenage daughter could move things with her mind. there were stranger things out there than ghosts.“it’s a haunting, jim hopper. i can’t go away.”
Relationships: Background Eleven | Jane Hopper/Mike Wheeler, Eleven | Jane Hopper & Jim "Chief" Hopper, Jim Hopper & Will Byers & Jonathan Byers, Jonathan Byers & Joyce Byers & Will Byers, Joyce Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper, Joyce Byers/Jim "Chief" Hopper, Past Joyce Byers/Lonnie Byers, background Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler
Comments: 28
Kudos: 83
Collections: Jopper Big Bang 2019





	your ghost (i will gladly bear)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TightropeFlea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TightropeFlea/gifts).



> so here it is. my massive, double the minimum word length, masterpiece for the jopper big bang 2019, featuring some gorgeous art by @tightropeflea. check her out!
> 
> warnings for (lots of) discussion of past domestic violence, joyce being (kind of) dead, and a very brief homophobic slur. 
> 
> yes, i know this is long, but please stick with it haha it's very close to my heart. i also have a spotify playlist for it under the same title on my user @palmviolet, so enjoy. title is from 'lanterns lit' by son lux, basically the theme song for this fic.

The house was nice. Small, but nice. A little tired, a little tattered, with wallpaper and flooring that hadn’t been updated since at least the early seventies, but the neighborhood seemed calm and quiet and that’s just what Hopper was looking for.

On their first day there El had jumped down from the U-Haul and surveyed it critically, clutching that tattered stuffed lion to her chest that he’d tried to replace but hadn’t been allowed to. She’d turned to him, raising an eyebrow, and said in that straightforward way of hers: “Home?”

“Yeah, kid,” he said, moving to stand beside her and ruffling her hair fondly. “Home.”

There was work to be done, of course. The front yard was a forest of weeds and the decor left much to be desired, but they spent their first night on sleeping mats in the front room because they were too tired to move the beds. El persuaded him to plug the TV in, though, so he ordered pizza and they sat there watching Westerns together all evening.

“So what d’ya think of the house?” he said, when the screen had gone dark.

She shrugged and dipped the crust of her pizza in hot sauce. “It’s old.”

“Old?” It was built in the fifties at the earliest, he was pretty sure. Not exactly old - but then again, El had warped conceptions of time. “In what way?”

“I don’t know.” She finished her pizza and he tried not to smile at the sauce on her chin. “It feels old. Like…” She seemed to struggle for the words. “There are memories here.”

Huh. He could sense no such thing, but then El of course was far more attuned to such... otherworldly things. “If you say so.”

She seemed satisfied, and turned her attention to the tub of ice cream he’d also conveniently ordered. He swore somedays the kid was insatiable when it came to food.

It was the same with breakfast, too. She bitched and moaned at him until he managed to find the toaster for her precious Eggos. Then he sat and watched her eat them while he nursed a mug of gritty black coffee and stared at the walls, wondering where to start. Where could he possibly start? The outdated green bathroom with the damp creeping across the ceiling? The terribly patched up hole in the wall of the front room? He wanted to tear up the carpet, too, because it was brown and moth-eaten and lifting in the corners. So much to do.

El nodded her head and another waffle flew across the room from the packet straight onto her plate. “Hey!” he said, a little more forcefully than necessary. “What did I say? No frivolous use of powers.”

“What does frivolous mean?” she mumbled, not meeting his eyes.

He sighed. “For fun. When it’s not necessary. Frivolous equals unsafe, got it?” He eyed her over the rim of his mug. “Let’s make that word of the day, huh?”

She sighed too and began to shovel her latest Eggo into her mouth, and he realized that while he was admonishing her for using her powers he’d neglected to forbid her from eating the product of them. The problems he had, as the adopted father of a psychic teenage girl.

She’d been all but swept into his care after Hawkins Lab shut down. There were reports of evil experiments, men in labcoats were taken away in handcuffs and the town was a never-ending media circus, but Hopper didn’t care about any of that because suddenly there was this girl he had to look after, this girl who barely spoke and could move things with her mind.

She’d stayed with him for the first few weeks, while the town was in chaos. Then one morning they were eating Eggos together, late, the golden sun streaming in through the cabin windows, because he’d finally convinced her to start eating, and there’d been a knock on the door. Social Services. He’d fought them every step of the way, because no way in hell was she landing in government hands again. Even if it was legitimate - even if there was some loving family waiting for her - her name, her address, they’d all be on government record. Ready for her to be taken and experimented on and used as a weapon again, if those monsters chose.

So, with some inside help, Hopper had managed to get a new birth certificate and an address in a town far far away. They’d packed up their stuff, three months into their cohabitation by now, and moved here. A little brown bungalow at the very edge of suburbia, in a town affectionately known as Buttfuck-Nowhere. It was perfect.

Settling in was surprisingly easy. El was just happy to be anywhere that wasn’t the lab and Hopper- well, he was happy to be anywhere that wasn’t Hawkins. It was a fixer-upper, but it would do. They spent the week painting and mending and replacing. El, as it turned out, was an excellent decorator. Being able to strip wallpaper with your mind certainly helped, it seemed.

On something like their ninth day, the night before he’d decided he’d finally let her go out and make some friends, she said casually over dinner (ordered-in fried chicken and fries) - “Who’s the woman who lives here?”

He nearly choked on his beer. “Woman? What woman?”

“The woman. In the house.”

If this was four months ago, before he took El in and swore off most of his bad habits, then he’d think it was one of his one-night stands. But as it was he hadn’t slept with anyone since then and so it couldn’t be.

So who was this woman? “There’s no woman here, kid. Just you and me.”

El frowned, her forehead creasing adorably. He had to resist the urge to ruffle her hair again. “But I saw her.”

He hoped it wasn’t a symptom of something. Hoped she wasn’t regressing- making things up- hallucinating- Because if nothing else he couldn’t really take her to the doctor, not before they were settled. He couldn’t risk exposing her like that, not yet.

He kept the interaction in the back of his mind, some part of him ticking over and looking for signs. Meanwhile the house gradually took shape around them, and began to smell less of paint and more of home. He put pictures up, and let El stick up posters on her walls. (He drew the line at her painting them bright yellow, because if nothing else it gave him a headache, but the posters were a free-for-all. He couldn’t deny her that, not really. Not after all she’d been through.)

And then one night it hit him, all at once, how far he’d moved on. Hawkins was Hawkins, it was still familiar ground. It wasn’t New York, it wasn’t the place he’d known Sara, but it was the place he’d dreamed of her. Dreamed of a beautiful wife and a beautiful daughter and a beautiful career, all to match. Only life didn’t work out like that - it never did - so he was left with none of those things. Only a daughter who was more fierce than delicate, who might bristle at being called daughter at all, but still clutched Sara’s old stuffed lion close to her chest.

He was choking back a sob in his room lit up with moonlight when there was a sound, and every muscle tensed. A habit learned in Vietnam, in a lifetime of patrolling the streets as a caffeine-addicted cop. He straightened up and wiped away his tears, ready to fight off any intruder he might face. Because he could sense that he wasn’t alone in the room. And it wasn’t inconceivable that there was a burglar in there with him right this second - the room was on the ground floor (since the house was just a bungalow) and he’d left the window propped open on account of the hot weather.

He pressed back the grief - the all-consuming, aching grief that he was never able to leave far enough behind - and got to his feet.

But there was no one there.

Only the curtains stirring faintly in the breeze, lit up in pale blue by the moonbeams streaming in. The soft creak of a floorboard, that he put down to the house’s natural movements, because there was nothing else it could be. Right?

That night he slept uneasily. He could almost feel another’s gaze on him, all throughout the night, but there was no one there. There was no one there.

\--

He’d swept into the position of local Chief easy enough. When he’d applied for the job they’d taken one look at his years in New York, his time in ‘Nam, his role in taking down the evil government institution known locally as ‘Hawkins Lab’, and given it to him on the spot. A little intimidated, perhaps. The mayor - for all intents and purposes his boss - was certainly afraid of him, which was just as well, because Hopper was always late for work. He left early, too, because he didn’t like to leave El on her own for so long. Soon enough she’d have to integrate into the neighborhood - but for now, she was his little secret.

His co-workers - subordinates, in fact - were just as lazy as he, if not lazier. Callahan was greener than grass and Powell was, to put it mildly, an incorrigible cynic. On Hopper’s first day Callahan had hurriedly removed his feet from his desk while Powell had just rolled his eyes in his direction.

It was on his second week there that Powell had asked, quite innocuously, “So where’re you living, Chief?

“What, you wanna know where you can find your wife when she’s not at home?” He grinned as Callahan laughed and Powell scowled.

“Just curious, is all. Not much property going around here.”

After a moment, Hopper decided it was just an innocent question. He could never be too sure, not with El in his charge. But it was all on file anyway, so. “Down Westerburg Street.”

Callahan’s eyes widened in the background and Powell let out a low whistle. “Damn, not the old Byers place?’

Hopper narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, and?”

“Chief, seriously, didn’t you hear about what happened?”

He was beginning to get annoyed. Another thing he’d learnt about his coworkers was that apart from being supremely lazy they were also notoriously superstitious. “Tell me what the fuck happened, Powell, before I die from the suspense.”

“Well-” he leaned closer conspiratorially “-the wife disappeared. Just gone, poof. Just like that. No trace. We looked - would’ve looked for longer, if the husband hadn’t wanted it all to be over.”

“The husband?”

“Lonnie Byers. Right piece of work, trust me. We’ve arrested him on half a dozen charges of public intoxication, assault-”

“-Assaulting a police officer,” Callahan cut in eagerly. “He got me right across the face. I had a black eye for weeks. Weeks!”

“Anyway,” Powell continued, a little disgruntled, “it’s a cold case now. Byers took the kids and moved house - didn’t even leave town, the asshole.”

“Kids?” Suddenly Hopper’s interest sharpened. A woman running away from her husband without a trace - that, he could understand. Especially given the impression that he was a violent man. But with kids involved? Mothers didn’t leave their children. Not ever. He knew that firsthand, from the agony in Diane’s sobs and her coldness to him after.

“Yeah, two of ‘em. Boys. Didn’t seem to like their dad much, from what I remember, but he took ‘em home anyway. Guess they had no place else to go.”

He winced at Powell’s callous tone. These kids - they could be victims of abuse, or at the very least neglect. Maybe this Lonnie Byers killed his wife, covered up the evidence, and took on the kids with the greatest reluctance.

“You didn’t look into him at all? I mean, come on, the wife disappears? Husband’s gotta be the prime suspect. Especially with his priors.”

Powell shrugged. “I mean, we looked, but there didn’t seem to be that much in it. No physical evidence or anything.”

“But-” Callahan started, then shrank under his coworker’s glare.

“But what?” Hopper pressed. There had to be more to the story.

“The kid, the older one, he was called something like Jason? Joseph? But anyway, he said something about his dad slapping his mom around a few times. Said one time she landed in the hospital.”

Hopper’s jaw tightened and he looked at Powell, glaring daggers. “What about that wasn’t worth telling me, huh? So, what, you heard that and still thought it wasn’t worth pursuing? Didn’t think there was enough evidence with an eyewitness account?”

Powell shrugged, apparently not intimidated by the force of Hopper’s stare. “Chief, we did what we could. The evidence just wasn’t there. The kid’s report was all circumstantial, nothing concrete. We don’t know what happened to the mom, we just don’t. Could’ve been anything. She might’ve run off, sick and tired of being kicked around.”

“And left her kids?” Hopper shook his head. “No, that’s bullshit.”

He shrugged again. “Just telling it like it is, Chief. Like I said, the case is closed.”

“Cold. Not closed.”

“Don’t we have real shit to be dealing with?” Callahan broke in. “Like, I don’t know, the attempted burglary on Main Street?”

“Hey,” Hopper snapped. “This is real shit. Okay? Just because neither of you care about this woman or her kids-”

“Oh, we cared. This was the biggest thing that’s ever happened in this town. A woman going missing with literally no trace? Goddamn, it was big. Maybe would’ve been bigger if it had been one of the kids instead, but still. People wanted her found. But she was just… gone. She’s gone, Chief. It was real shit at the time but, like you said, it’s cold now. It’s over.”

Hopper let the matter slide for now. He could see he wasn’t going to get anywhere, not with these two. They were small-town cops, born and bred. They’d never had to actually solve a case in their lives. But his time in New York had taught him some shit - mainly that nothing was as it appeared, but also (somewhat paradoxically) that the simplest explanation was usually the right one.

In this case, all his instincts were screaming at him.

Lonnie Byers had murdered his wife, probably in the very house where Hopper and his daughter now lived. And if that wasn’t some divine call to investigate-

Well, then he didn’t know what was.

\--

El hadn’t forgotten about the supposed woman. He thought she had, and had been relieved to think so. She got on with the decorating quietly, head down, entirely focused on the steady movement of the paintbrush up and down while he tackled the front wall.

But then, when he dared to touch the roughly boarded up hole, she swung around and glared at him so intensely he had to struggle not to flinch. “Don’t,” was all she said.

“‘Don’t’? Don’t what?”

“Don’t touch.” She indicated the hole with her eyes.

“Kid, I gotta fix it up. It’s letting a draft in, which is fine for now, but come winter we’ll freeze to death.”

She just shook her head. “Don’t.”

He sighed, setting the hammer down and moving towards her. “Why? What’s going on?”

“It’s important. The woman said so.”

He tensed. “The woman? This the same woman from before?” He tried to keep his voice casual, but he wasn’t sure he succeeded. El narrowed her eyes.

“Yes. Her name is Joyce.”

“Joyce? You’ve been talking to her now?”

She nodded. “The hole is important. It’s a- a-” She hesitated, clearly struggling to find or recall the right word. “A door.”

“A door.” He was aware that his voice was painfully sceptical. “A door to where? The outside?”

Again, she shook her head. “To another place. Bad place.”

“Bad place.” She’d used this phrase before, in a far different context. Back when she still jumped at every sound and was thin as a rake under a hospital gown. “Like- your bad place? With the bad men?”

“No. Different. It’s dark. And cold.”

 _Dark and cold._ Where did she get this shit? If she’d been watching horror movies on the TV while he was at work after he’d expressly told her not to, he swore he’d cut off her TV completely-

“Don’t. Touch. The hole.” Her face softened. “Please. It’s the only way she can visit.”

Visit? He was beginning to feel a twinge of concern. Maybe this was some kind of coping mechanism, after everything she’d experienced in the Lab. Maybe this Joyce was some sort of imaginary, surrogate mother figure.

In a few months, maybe, he could take her to a kid therapist. Get the shrink to look in her head, though he’d have to conceal the real facts of her case. Shit, it would be easier said than done. Still- if she needed it-

For now, though, he guessed he had to play along.

“Okay, kid. I won’t touch it for now. But if you’re cold when fall arrives-”

She shook her head. “I’ll be fine. Promise.”

He knew how much promises meant to her, so clearly this was serious. With a sigh he backed away from the wall, already thinking of the myriad other things he had to do instead. El’s imaginary friend could wait, he thought, until he’d retiled the bathroom.

—

It was nearing the peak of the summer when Hopper went to work and finally had his chance to dig more into whatever the fuck had happened to the Byers family. But before that he decided to spend the morning clearing the front yard, instead of sweating in his stuffy little office, because it was more like a jungle than a lawn.

He was crouching over a particularly tenacious weed, tugging with all his strength, when a faint shadow fell over him and he looked up into a smiling woman’s face.

“You having fun there?” she said.

He surveyed her critically, squinting against the glare of the sun. She was beautiful, that was true. Longish dark hair, brown eyes that were just short of too large for her face. Her clothes were completely inappropriate for the hot weather - a dark purple turtleneck and patched, faded jeans. He wondered that she wasn’t wilting in the heat.

He wanted to stand up - to face her on equal terms, because in her posture there was something of a challenge - but if he let go of the plant now he’d never get it up.

“How about helping, instead of just standing there?”

She shrugged, and didn’t move. “Sorry.”

He gritted his teeth and pulled - and finally the weed came up, showering him in earth. He dropped it in the pile and straightened up. Noticed absently that the woman still looked perfectly clean.

“So, what, are you a neighbor? If you’re here to bring a housewarming gift you’re several weeks late.”

She looked wary, suddenly. Eyes narrowing, slender fingers toying with a loose thread on her sleeve. “You should be grateful I haven’t baked you cookies. You’d probably die from food poisoning.”

“Shame. My daughter’s always begging for sweet stuff.”

“Huh, sure she is. My boys-“ Suddenly she broke off, swallowed hard. Her hands trembled.

“You okay?” he felt urged to ask. There was something different about this woman - something tender, fragile. She was incredibly pale, he noticed.

She nodded, quickly, hurriedly, moved on after only a moment. “How old is she?”

From anyone else it might have seemed invasive, suspicious. He might have shut down, told her to _fuck off_ in no uncertain terms. But this woman - well. He didn’t know. But she didn’t seem malicious, or suspicious, in any way at all. She just seemed sad.

The only problem was, however, that he didn’t actually know. El’s records had been burnt in an accidental-but-deliberate fire right before the Lab was shut down. She could have been fifteen - a very malnourished fifteen, mind you - or she could have been ten. He really didn’t know.

“Thirteen,” he settled on after a moment, then realised it may very well not match up with her birth certificate. Fuck, he had to check on that.

“The same age as my Will,” she said, almost to herself. She wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were on the grass.

“Will?”

She flinched suddenly. “I gotta go.”

Before he could protest- at least ask her her goddamn name- she had turned away. He looked at the ground as he shrugged off his gloves but when he looked back she was gone, as if she’d never been there. Leaving no trace.

The encounter pressed on his mind as he headed into work that afternoon. He was greeted by mocking jeers about his timing, to which he responded with the usual crude jokes about his colleagues’ wives. It was such a mindless repertoire, a normal part of his day by now, that he was able to complete it without even thinking, his mind still on that morning in the garden.

“Hey, Chief, you’ll never guess who came knocking today.”

“Who?” he asked distractedly, throwing his hat without looking in the direction of his desk.

“Jonathan goddamn Byers.”

Immediately his interest sharpened. He swung around to stare at Powell. “Well? What did he want?”

Powell shrugged. “Some trouble with his dad, said he’s not giving them any lunch money but he won’t let the kid get a job either. I said there’s nothing we can do.”

Hopper bristled. “Damn right there’s something we can do. That’s child neglect.”

“Is it?”

He chose to believe that Powell was just clueless, rather than purposefully ignorant. If those kids got hurt under their watch- after they failed to find the mom, or at least catch her killer-

“Give me the file.”

“What?” Powell sat up, startled, and removed his feet from the desk.

“Give me the fucking file, Powell, or I swear to god I’ll fire you.”

He jumped to attention like he’d been slapped. Hopper rubbed his temples as Powell rooted through the filing cabinet, finally bringing out a disappointingly thin manila folder that he slapped down on the desk with a little more force than necessary. “Here,” he mumbled, “since you’re so goddamn eager.”

Hopper chose to ignore this last remark in favor of tugging the folder towards him, dropping gracelessly into Powell’s abandoned chair. The first page was the crime scene report - only there was no crime scene, only the house. Hopper’s house, now. He noted with vague alarm - like distant sirens calling - that the hole in the wall of the front room was described in detail as being ‘fresh’, like a gaping open wound.

He went to turn the page but before he could, he was interrupted by a hand landing on his shoulder. He turned to see Flo, her matronly face one he was already used to. “You digging into cold cases already? You’ve only been here a few weeks.”

“I fail to see how it matters to you,” he drawled, only half serious.

“It matters to me because I’m the one who has to log when you open and close all those cases,” she chided. “Which one is that, anyway? The old Byers case?”

He nodded.

“So sad. She really was lovely, Joyce. A little, well… disturbed, but you couldn’t blame her with a husband like that.”

He’d tuned her out as soon as he heard the name. Joyce? No. It couldn’t be. A coincidence, surely. Only Joyce wasn’t so common a name, not really, not common enough for El to have invented it for her imaginary friend- the imaginary woman who lived in their house- the same house where a woman of the same name disappeared-

“Joyce?” he croaked.

Flo frowned. “That was her name, yes. Are you feeling alright? You’re looking a bit peaky. Like you’ve seen a ghost.”

He almost smiled a little bitterly at the thought. It was impossible - wasn’t it? But maybe - just maybe - his daughter had.

\--

When he got home he dumped the manila folder on the kitchen counter, to look at later, and went straight to El’s room. She was curled on her bed reading a book he was ninety-nine percent sure he’d never seen before - some old, battered edition of _Sketches by Boz_. Hopper knew for a fact he himself had never purchased nor read a single word of Dickens, so as for where she’d got it-

“Where’d you get that, kid?”

“Hey, Dad. Joyce gave it to me,” she said without looking up.

He was so struck by the first part of her answer - _Dad_ , she hadn’t called him _Dad_ before - that he almost didn’t register the second. But then it hit and he remembered the reason he’d come in here in the first place.

He moved to sit on her bed and slowly, warily, she lowered the book. “This Joyce - she say anything else? Anything about herself?”

She shrugged. “Just that she’s stuck, and she needs the door to stay open. You didn’t- fix- the wall, did you?”

He shook his head. “That’s all she said? And she gave you that book?”

“She didn’t give it. She showed me where.”

He frowned. “Can you show me?”

She nodded and he followed her out of her room, down to the room that was now his. Ordinarily he’d have been a little discomfited at her sneaking around in his room, but the fact that she believed she’d been led in there by a woman who wasn’t really there was rather more pressing.

She crouched on the floor and peeled up a section of carpet in the corner, which had been lifting anyway. Underneath was a loose board that she removed to reveal more books and an unmarked shoebox. “She said I can have the books. But not the box.”

As if he hadn’t heard her, he reached down and took out the shoebox.

“Stop!” El hissed, trying to grab it out of his arms. “She said don’t touch.”

He continued to ignore her. Something about this whole situation - the books, the box, the goddamn fucking name - was setting his teeth on edge. There was nothing in it, surely. Just a simple coincidence. El had been snooping around, that’s how she found the books under the carpet.

(He reflected that if he’d been a little more proactive with the decorating, he’d have found them first. He’d been putting off his room until the end, because in all honesty he was used to living in worse conditions than this. Everything else came first, even the yard.)

“How did she know this was here?” he asked, eyes still on the box in his hands.

“It’s hers. From when she used to live here. Don’t. Touch.” With a forceful glare of hers the box flew out of his hands and landed on the floor, hard, springing open at the impact. Its contents spilled everywhere.

“Hey!” he shouted, a little louder than necessary. That was another ground rule he’d tried to establish - no powers against friends. Especially not against him. No matter how mad she was, no matter how wrong he was. (And he’d freely admit he was wrong a lot of the time.)

She ignored his gaze and bent to look at the objects on the floor. With a sigh he did too, his curiosity getting the better of him. It was an odd selection. A folded piece of paper, which he picked up and opened out to see was a kid’s drawing - only, not just a kid’s drawing. The figures were bright and colorful, true, but they were incredibly detailed. A kid with talent. Scrawled on the back, in clearly more adult handwriting, was _Will, Dec. 1982._ There was also a little pouch, made of faux velvet, and when he opened it a delicate necklace tipped out onto his palm. It was (to his inexperienced eye) sterling silver - a tiny, finely wrought Star of David on a slim chain.

El was inspecting a little polaroid photo, of a teenage boy with dark hair and a sullen face surprised into a smile. The background, when Hopper looked closer, was their kitchen - as it had been, before he stripped the wallpaper and painted the cupboards, but fresher and newer, without the tired decay that comes with the house being empty for months. Scribbled over the bottom, in that same messy handwriting, was _Sept. 1983._

Only a few months before the family’s lives came crashing down. Only a few months before Joyce went missing - murdered, taken, just _gone._ He reflected it was increasingly unlikely that she’d run off, because these were clearly all her most precious possessions - along with, still buried at the bottom of the box, a thick envelope of cash she’d clearly been saving.

Saving to leave her husband?

Taking the kids with her, he could bet. If these items - so personal, so individual, so telling of quiet love and happiness - were anything to go by. She’d planned to leave her husband, or at the very least kept all this as a stash away from his prying eyes. Concealed under the carpet and floorboards where a drunken mess would never think to look.

 _From when she used to live here._ There had to be more to El’s whole imaginary thing, but it couldn’t be anything more superstitious than a coincidence. It couldn’t be. Joyce- the box-

He had to have another look at that folder. Take a proper goddamn look and find what his lazy coworkers had missed. And then he had to take a look around the house with a fine-toothed comb, in case - just in case. Maybe this woman was still squatting here somehow, unnoticed, unseen. Maybe she was stealing food out of the fridge.

(For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why she would be, why in the world she would possibly do that - but it made more sense than some of the more outlandish theories his brain could come up with.)

He went back to the kitchen with head spinning, hands itching to flip through the folder, to find-

It was gone.

The counter was empty, save for a stray half finished packet of Eggos and an empty cocoa mug that El had failed to wash up. He searched the table, the couch, shifting papers and paint swatches and numerous packs of Camels but it was nowhere to be found.

Somehow-

He didn’t fucking know how-

The folder was gone.

\--

El was starting school the following week. It struck him as soon - too soon - but she was going stir-crazy, he couldn’t deny that. And sure, she was behind on stuff like culture and history, but she had an innate ability at math and he’d caught her swearing in Russian, so it wasn’t like she wasn’t smart enough. She could read and write and her vocabulary was building by the day - especially with that goddamn Dickens book, which he hadn’t seen her put down. She’d read it at least twice by now.

He took her shopping a few days before the semester was due to begin. She’d been in awe of the shops, the cars, Main Street in general, and maybe he regretted not bringing her out sooner.

On the way out of the stationary store he all but collided with a woman on her way in. She was blonde - overtly, purposefully so - and dressed exactly like all the other suburban wives he’d met in this town, and back in Hawkins too. She had in tow a tallish, lanky kid with dark hair and eyes that fixed on the floor as soon as he spotted El.

“Oh, hi!” the woman said. “You’re the new Chief, right?”

He nodded a little warily.

“Hopper, right? I’m Karen. Karen Wheeler.” She held out a manicured hand and hesitantly he shook it. “This is Michael.”

She indicated the kid and he scowled. “It’s Mike.”

“I’m El,” El blurted out behind Hopper, suddenly brave.

“I heard you’re living down Westerburg Street,” Karen said, sympathetic concern suddenly coming into her face. How the fuck did she know that? And more to the point, why was it any of her business? “In the old Byers place? Joyce Byers was a good friend of mine. It hit us all hard.”

 _Not as hard as it hit her boys, I bet,_ he thought silently. Just nodded instead.

“She really was a great person. Her youngest - Will - he’s a good friend of Mike’s still. It’s nice Lonnie didn’t move them out of town.”

This time he couldn’t resist raising an eyebrow. “Lonnie,” he just said flatly.

Karen, apparently more astute than she first appeared, clearly caught the insinuation. “He’s- well, he’s an acquired taste,” she said, with a quick glance at her son. “It was such a shame that it was Joyce who disappeared, instead of- well-” She trailed off, her eyes moving from his, then landing on El and brightening considerably. “Is your daughter starting school this week?”

“Yes,” El cut in, glaring at him as if she knew he’d been about to answer for her.

“Cool,” Mike said suddenly. “What grade?”

She quailed suddenly, her gaze changing from a glare to a look in search of support. Hopper dutifully supplied the answer. “Eighth.”

“Oh, the same as Michael! Perhaps you two can be friends. Will’s going into eighth grade too - though, of course, I wouldn’t mention you guys living in his old house if I were you. It would probably bring up bad memories, right?”

Hopper nodded along, only half listening. The mention of Will had sent his mind whirling. What if the kid knew something? What if both kids did? What if maybe, just maybe, Hopper could get them away from what was a neglectful home at best, and a downright abusive one more likely?

“Maybe we could set something up for all you guys. That could be fun, right? Maybe El could come and play D and D with you, Michael.”

“Maybe,” he said, shrugging and looking at the ground. It wasn’t just a lack of enthusiasm, though. Hopper could tell. The kid had probably never spoken to a girl his age in his life. Hopper wasn’t sure he wanted El to be the first - but by the sounds of it, there was a whole group of them. It would be good for her to have some friends. (Friends who weren’t potentially the ghost of their house’s previous tenant.)

“Sounds good, right, El? To have some friends before you start?”

“Friends,” she repeated, eyes wide. She turned back to Mike. “Let’s be- friends.”

Mike, to his credit, didn’t look too obviously disconcerted by her blunt approach. His discomfort melted away and he gave her a slight, warm smile. “Sure.”

That was how, the night before school started, El came home a little late with a wide grin and flecks of popcorn in her hair. “Hi, Dad,” she said, slumping down on the sofa with an air of melodrama she’d clearly learnt from those kids.

“Hey,” he said in return, a little cautiously. “You have fun?”

She nodded. “They played… Dee en dee? And we watched a movie.”

“Oh yeah? What did you watch?”

“Ghostbusters. Then they told ghost stories.”

“What kinda stories?” he asked, keeping his voice carefully neutral. If these kids had put more of those fantastical ideas in her head-

“All kinds. Mike’s was the best. It was romantic - not like the ghosts in Ghostbusters, they were gross.”

“So you’re interested in ghosts now, huh?”

She nodded, and didn’t make the connection.

Gently, so as not to spoil her glow of happiness, he decided to address it. “El- you’re still seeing Joyce, aren’t you?”

She frowned, brow creasing adorably. “Yes.”

“And the woman who used to live here, who disappeared. Her name was Joyce too.”

“She’s not a ghost.” El’s voice was surprisingly firm, adamant. “Not a ghost.”

He sighed. “What is she, then? You gotta give me something to work with here, kid. I don’t know if you’re- if you’re seeing things, or just making it up, or if something else is going on-”

“Not. Making. It up.” She glared at him so hard he was half afraid he might go flying across the room. But maybe she was learning her boundaries, because nothing happened.

“Okay, kid. You’re not making it up. But I-” He sighed. “I gotta know what’s going on.”

She bit her lip. “She took your folder.”

“What?”

“Your folder. That was on the counter. She said not to tell you.”

The words only made his ridiculous - implausible, frankly impossible - suspicions grow. “And she only talks to you because…?”

El gave a funny little smile. “She tried. To talk to you. But you didn’t understand.”

Slowly, his stare deepened, the puzzle pieces slowly interlocking. It couldn’t be- unless-

The next morning, after he dropped El off at school and tried not to let the butterflies in his stomach on her account flutter too turbulently, he went to the library. He found the relevant news cutting - only six months old - and clicked it into the slide reader, staring at his reflection in the glass as he waited for the article to flick up. Was he really doing this? Was he really, seriously doing this? Following an instinct that all sense, all logic was screaming was wrong?

He’d never been one to let logic get in the way.

The article lit up, and suddenly logic didn’t matter, because he’d been right. The puzzle pieces fit together, fit together so completely they left the transition perfectly seamless behind them. Staring at him out of the screen, under the grave white heading _MISSING_ , was an inverted portrait. Shorter hair askew, doe eyes looking away from the camera, features difficult to make out in the stark negative - but it was her.

The woman he’d met in the garden.

Joyce Byers.

For all intents and purposes, a ghost.

\--

He abandoned any idea of work that afternoon. Sitting in his office while his daughter was at school and his house was inhabited by a ghost? Fuck no. He motored home trailed by the scent of burnt rubber.

He slowed as he walked up to the porch. As stupid as it was, he didn’t want to scare her off. If he did, he’d never get the proof he needed to convince himself he wasn’t going crazy.

“Joyce?” he called lowly, carefully shutting the door behind him. The house was empty and silent. The walls stood there and watched him mockingly and he began to feel increasingly foolish. What was he doing? Really, what the fuck was he doing?

“Joyce?” he said again, beginning to give up hope. With a sigh he went into the kitchen and dropped his keys on the table, reasoning that there was no point in going into work now. He was contemplating the fridge - he may as well have an early lunch - when his eye caught on something and he stopped still.

On the counter-

Not where he’d left it beside the toaster, but further away, towards the sink-

The manila folder.

 _What the fuck?_ He stepped towards it, transfixed. He’d searched everywhere, all but overturned the house over the past week. He’d asked Flo for a copy, but there wasn’t one, thus subjecting himself to her looming disapproval. There’d been no trace of it. But here it was.

“Thought you might want that back,” came an easy but tired voice from behind him.

He whipped around.

It was Joyce. She was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, in the same clothes as before, though he could have sworn her hair looked half an inch longer. It struck him, now that he was standing too, that she was tiny. Almost two heads shorter than him.

“Joyce,” he said, stupefied, as if he knew her - as if they were on first-name terms, which they weren’t. But then again, maybe they were, if she’d been living in his house all this time. (Or he’d been living in hers.)

“Yeah, uh, that’s my name.” She smiled a little. “You finally worked it out?”

“No thanks to you,” he muttered, glaring at the folder. He wanted to look - to finally inspect all those details she’d apparently been keeping from him for a week - but it seemed almost rude to do so in her presence. Bizarrely like seeing her in her underwear.

“Go on,” she said, seemingly guessing his thoughts. “It won’t bite.”

Slowly he reached for it and tipped it open. There was the first page, which he’d already seen - the crime scene report. Stapled to the second was the missing poster he’d seen at the library, in natural colors this time. The wide eyes staring out at him of the dead woman standing next to him.

“Why’d you take it?” he asked suddenly.

Her voice came from directly behind him and he jumped about a foot in the air, because she’d moved to look over his shoulder without making a sound. “I didn’t know if I could trust you,” she said plainly.

He supposed he followed. He’d seen her that very morning, before he came home with the file - if he’d seen her missing poster that evening, the pieces would have come together that much sooner. But still. “So why’d you give it back?”

“Because something tells me I can.”

He regarded her through narrow eyes. She looked solid enough, and certainly nothing like those awful monsters in the movie El liked. She was breathing, too - did ghosts need to breathe? Habit, maybe.

He still couldn’t quite believe all this. She couldn’t really be a ghost, could she? This had to be some mix-up. Coincidence, mistake, maybe he was hallucinating- but then again, his teenage daughter could move things with her mind. There were stranger things out there than ghosts.

“You asking yourself if I’m real?”

He snapped out of his thoughts and stared at her. “Little bit, yeah.”

She held out a slender, small hand. “Go on. I can see you’re dying to.”

Hesitantly he reached out and touched her hand - only there was no warm skin under his fingers, no tender contact between them. His hand passed through empty air like she wasn’t even there - though she was, but somehow she wasn’t.

Joyce retracted her hand and smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “See? You’re not going crazy.”

“I might still be going crazy.” He stared, still trying to process- to compute- This kind of shit didn’t happen. It just didn’t happen. Dead people didn’t come back to life. So his next question- “You’re dead, then. You didn’t run off.”

“Run off.” She scoffed bitterly. “God, I’m sure Lonnie had great fun putting that rumor around. No, I didn’t fucking run off.”

“So-” he started, the detective in him rising up, but then he stopped. Thought about how this woman - well, she was a real person. A real person who’d died, sure, but a real person nonetheless. Jesus Christ. And if popular culture was anything to go by, he ought to be nice to her or she’d put a curse on his family or something equally sinister.

(Besides, some strange part of him didn’t want to scare her off.)

“Your daughter’s nice,” Joyce said, offhand, like she was throwing him a bone.

“You know, I’m actually glad there’s a ghost living in my house, because it means she’s not losing her mind.”

“ _Living_. That’s a little ironic, huh?” Again, her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Am I a ghost? I guess I am.”

“El doesn’t think you are.” He leaned against the counter, surprising himself with his own loose posture. He was facing a fucking ghost - he should at the very least be tense, shouldn’t he? But he wasn’t. The moment had taken on a surreal quality, like he was watching it on film.

“No? What does she think, then?”

He shrugged. “No idea. I never know what’s going on in her head.”

“I think you do. She’s just a normal girl, really. You should treat her like one. You ever work with kids?”

He thought of Sara and flinched. That was a whole other matter to process, now. Now that he knew ghosts were real, only his Sara hadn’t come back as one. Hadn’t come back to him. But he wasn’t dealing with that now. Not in front of Joyce. So he just shook his head. “Never been great with ‘em.” His voice was unnecessarily gruff.

She raised an eyebrow. “But you took in El.”

“Hey, what the hell do you know about that? It’s not like she talks much.”

“She told me about the ‘bad place’. She likes to talk, if you’re willing to listen.” The implication was that he wasn’t, and he bristled. “She likes to read, too. Clearly more than you.”

“You gave her Dickens,” he grumbled. “No reasonable person reads Dickens for fun.”

“Who said she was reasonable?” Joyce was smiling again, but he thought this time he could detect something more genuine in it.

“Point taken.” He rested his eyes on her for a moment, looking her up and down. She wasn’t unattractive, if that was something one was allowed to say about a ghost. Beautiful, even, though he wasn’t gonna go down that path. Figuring out how to coexist with a ghost in the house was going to be hard enough without objectifying her in the process. ( _Especially_ when he couldn’t touch her, not even to brush her hand.)

“So, her first day of school. You getting the helicopter-parent jitters yet?” Joyce continued, apparently oblivious.

“Sure,” he said, tearing his eyes away. “Sure, but it’s more than helicopter parenting. The kid’s got psionic powers, she can look after herself. It’s the other kids I’m worried about.”

(Absently, he reflected how nice it was - how goddamn nice - to be honest with someone. Really, truly honest. To be able to discuss everything he’d had to keep hidden with an adult, a real adult. Even if said adult was dead.)

To his surprise, she laughed. “She’s a smart kid. She can look after herself, like you said. That extends to- well- keeping a low profile.”

“I goddamn hope so,” he said, voice low.

“You’re lucky. Will- he was tormented.” Suddenly her smile dropped. “Is- was- fuck. I don’t fucking know anymore, do I?”

“I’m sorry, Joyce,” he said softly. He meant it. He couldn’t imagine-

The grief would be a double-edged sword. The kids grieving their mom, the mom grieving her kids as they moved on without her. The house being sold, Joyce waiting miserably in the dark to watch the latest residents invade. Suddenly he could understand the tradition of malevolent spirits trying to evict unwitting movie protagonists.

Her jaw tightened and her image flickered, for the first time appearing faint and unreal. Her vitality - so present, so _alive_ only a second ago - faded a little. “I gotta go,” she said. “I’m tired.”

Did it cost her energy to stay in this… well, plane? Did she have to go back to the ‘dark and cold’ place, as El had described it? Either way- “Wait!” he called, suddenly urgent. “You’re gonna- you’re gonna be back, right?’

Her translucent lips twisted mysteriously. “It’s a haunting, Jim Hopper. I can’t go away.”

He was left in the empty kitchen, alone.

\--

When El returned from school she was brimming with happiness, and it was enough to lift his gray, confused mood. “You’re back early,” he said, consciously bringing himself out of the amazed stupor he’d been in all afternoon.

“Mike dropped me off. With his bike.”

Bike, huh. Maybe that would make a good Christmas present. Or birthday - only he didn’t know when it was.

“And school? How was it?”

“Good.” She was describing some complicated experiment they’d done in science class, which was rather dominated by the presence of Mike in every other sentence, and he was just marvelling at how much she was actually talking for once, when suddenly she stopped. Her gaze was fixed on a point over his shoulder and he knew, even without turning around, who he’d find there.

“Sounds like fun,” Joyce said softly, uncrossing her arms and moving from where she’d been leaning against the wall.

“How long have you been there?” he asked, looking her up and down with that disbelief he couldn’t quite shed.

“Not long.” She smiled, and something about the way she was standing told him she wanted to take El in her arms. There was an easy maternal air about her, only nothing was easy anymore.

El renewed her description with more vigor, now that she knew Joyce was listening too. She had moved onto art class by the time she mentioned Will’s name for the first time, oblivious, and Joyce stiffened.

“Will?” she repeated, voice quiet.

El paused. “Yes. We have art class together.”

Joyce’s face was suddenly urgent and she surged forth, as if to take his daughter by the arms, but she stopped short at the last moment as if remembering she couldn’t. “How- how is he?” Her voice trembled.

All at once, El seemed to understand. Her face fell into a look of deep, deep sympathy. “Good. His drawings are- beaut-i-ful.” As Hopper felt a surge of pride at her emotional intelligence, Joyce let out a shaky sigh.

“Thank you,” she whispered. When El went off to her room Joyce met his eyes, and he saw that she was crying. He felt awkward, just standing there, wanting more than anything to touch her, to offer comfort - but he couldn’t. He settled on getting out his cigarettes. He offered her one, though he wasn’t sure if she could take it.

But she could. She sniffed and with a touch he couldn’t feel she plucked it from his hands, sliding it in between her lips. She’d never looked more real, more alive than she did right now. His lighter, when he raised it and flicked it open, cast a little golden glow over her face and when she breathed in the end of the cigarette glowed just like it would if she still had to breathe. She took a drag, exhaled, and the smoke swirled in the air like a visual, physical contradiction - living proof that she still breathed, though the soil had long since closed over her head.

“Thank you,” she said. He pretended he didn’t notice that her eyes were still red.

“Sure,” he said, offhand. He lit one for himself and moved to sit at the kitchen table. Slowly, like she was afraid she wasn’t welcome, Joyce came to join him, sliding soundlessly into the chair opposite.

After a moment of silence - “I guess you read the rest of my folder.”

He shook his head. She looked surprised. “I don’t have to, right? You’re right here. Horse’s mouth, and all,” he said, and cringed. That came out wrong- horrible, insensitive-

She brushed past that. “Huh, you’d think.” She flicked the ash from her cigarette into the ashtray, not meeting his eyes. “Only problem is, I don’t remember anything.”

That stopped him short. “You don’t remember anything? Nothing about how you-” He swallowed.

“Nothing.” Finally she looked at him, and he saw that her lighthearted tone belied the gut-wrenching fear in her eyes. “Hopper, I don’t remember _anything_ from that day. I don’t know if I died in my sleep or if-”

“Is that why you took the folder? You wanna figure out how you…”

“Died, Hop. How I died.” The nickname just slipped out, and he found he didn’t mind it. It was inconsequential, anyway, when she was looking at him so intently. “You’re allowed to say it.”

“ _Died._ Jesus. How do you even- I mean, how the fuck do you square with that?”

“You don’t,” she said humorlessly. “But I just- I need to know. Hop, I have to know. If I’m stuck here forever I at least have to know why.”

He looked at her for a long moment. He was well aware that the truth might be painful - too painful for her to bear. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know himself, now that he’d met her, now that he’d talked to her and seen her talk to his daughter. Now that he’d seen the real emotion in those deep eyes. He had the vaguely selfish desire to protect her, and himself, from the truth. But he’d started down this path, and the detective in him wouldn’t allow him to leave it alone. Neither would Joyce. The fire in her eyes was proof enough of that.

“Okay. Okay, I’ll look into it. But- you gotta be aware, it could be bad. There could be a reason you don’t remember.”

Her gaze didn’t waver. “I have to know.”

He nodded. It was her choice, in the end. He stood up and fetched the manila folder from the couch where he’d left it, returning and dropping it on the table between them. Joyce had moved to sit in the chair beside him, inclining her head to be better able to see, and when he sat beside her he had to repress a shiver at the strangeness of her being there - visible, apparently solid, apparently alive - yet having no physical presence at all. No warmth radiated off her, and he felt nothing where his hand brushed hers reaching for the page.

“I guess I’m lucky,” she said quietly, before they began. “It could’ve been anyone living here. I could have been facing an exorcism, rather than this. Or just someone who chose not to see at all. But you - the police chief - you just happened to walk in.”

He shrugged. “Lucky,” he repeated, knowing neither of them felt it.

He opened the folder and flicked through, passing out the pages and laying them out over the table. Photos of the house, old photos of Joyce, witness statements and reports and organised searches that all came to nothing. There was one image that she paused on, hands trembling as she held it up. “Karen,” she said quietly. It was a photograph of some candlelit vigil they’d clearly held, Joyce’s image surrounded by light and flowers right at the front like some kind of saint.

“Karen Wheeler? She organised that?”

“I guess she must’ve. She’s there at the front, and it’s- well- the kind of thing she’d do. After she brought a casserole over, of course. God, I bet she made my boys so many casseroles-”

She was getting choked up again, he could tell. All he could do was press on. “You see Lonnie in that photo?”

As he’d expected, her grief shifted into anger. “No. No, he’s not there. Asshole. At this point I’m not even surprised.”

“Joyce-” he said seriously, then stopped. How could he ask this, without her disappearing on him again? He knew how to get information from witnesses and suspects, sure, but they couldn’t vanish into thin air. She could. “Lonnie. Did he-”

“Hurt me?” Her jaw tightened. She bit her lip, looking down at her hands, loose and fidgety on the table. Her cigarette had long since burnt out. “He-” Again she fell silent.

It wasn’t a no. And if Jonathan said so, then it was probably true. He’d never met the kid but he couldn’t imagine him lying about that. (Or maybe he could - maybe he’d thought it was the only way they could get away from Lonnie. Whatever the truth, it hadn’t worked out.)

He tried to make his voice as gentle as he could. “Joyce, it says in here-” he nudged the folder “- that your kid, Jonathan, he said Lonnie was hurting you. He said you landed in the hospital.”

She visibly flinched. God, he wished he could touch her. Just offer her some reassurance by holding her hand. It was almost cruel.

“If that’s true, then…”

She stared at him. “What, you think- you think Lonnie did it? You think he- he _murdered_ me?”

“I don’t think anything, not yet.” That was maybe a lie. “But listen, nine times out of ten when someone- dies- it’s the spouse. Even in cases without a prior history of violence - and whether he was hurting you or not, he’s got plenty of that. It’s all here, right here in this file.” He showed her the report on Lonnie, his criminal record, the dark foreboding splotches of his fingerprints.

“Lonnie- I mean, he’s an ass, but a murderer?” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “ _My_ murderer?”

Hopper sighed helplessly. “I’m sorry, Joyce, but he’s gotta be a suspect.”

Her hands began to shake. “And my boys- God, they’re living with him, Hop, they’re fucking living with him-”

“I’ll check on them for you, okay? I’ll make sure they’re doing okay. I mean, you heard El, Will’s doing fine. He has a load of friends, there’s this whole nerdy group of them-”

She let out a shaky breath and closed her eyes against the tears that were once again threatening to fall. “Yeah. Okay. You’re right. It’s just- not being able to see them-”

“I get it,” he said softly. He did. When Sara had been in the hospital, or when she went back to school in that brief, tragically hopeful period of remission, he’d felt sick with worry whenever she was out of his sight. Like the worst might happen, just because he wasn’t there. And now there was El too. If he hadn’t been distracted by the whole Joyce situation he would have spent the day frantic. “So- you can’t leave?”

She shook her head. “I can’t go beyond the yard. I tried.” She shuddered. “It didn’t go well.”

He frowned at that, filing it away for later. What did any of this mean? There were all these unwritten rules, it seemed, like being able to touch objects but not people. “So does that mean…” He trailed off. What he’d been about to say - well, it felt a little too brutal.

“What?” she said wearily. “I’ve been dead six months, Hop. I’ve probably already asked myself whatever question you’re about to ask.”

“Does that mean you died here, or that you’re buried here? Or both?”

She visibly swallowed, and gave a thin laugh. “Yeah, okay, that is a little dark. I don’t know, I really don’t.”

“You sure? It could really help-”

“Being dead doesn’t come with a fucking handbook!” Her eyes flared. “I’m giving you everything I can, alright? None of this is exactly a picnic.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry.” He picked up the file again. “Looks like they brought dogs in, anyway. They would have found a body, if…”

“If I was still here.” She looked sad, resigned, and he was struck by some unexpected ferocity.

“You’re still here. Joyce, you’re still here.”

“Am I?” She raised her hand to his cheek and all he felt was a faint stir of cold air. His gaze dropped from hers as she retracted her arm, and shifted in her chair. “I gotta go. I can never stay on this side for long.”

“This side?” he questioned desperately-

But she was gone.

He stared down at the table, strewn with the information, evidence, puzzle pieces he had no idea how to fit together. Then El came in from her room and he hurried to shove it all back in the folder, because she didn’t need to see this. Didn’t need to read the words _Crime Scene_ and _Corpse Sniffer Dogs_ and _Traces of Blood_. (The crime scene had been released only a few short days - too short, Hopper thought - later, the sniffer dogs had been too distracted by the scent of the Byers’ own dog, and the traces of blood were just that - traces.)

“Did Joyce have to go?” El asked, as she moved to the kettle to make herself a drink. So grown up already, he caught himself thinking.

“Yeah, kiddo, she did.” He stood up and ruffled her hair. “You wanna make me a coffee?”

She reached for his mug and measured out a spoonful of instant coffee, frowning. “I don’t like her being sad. She’s sad, even when she smiles.”

“Yeah? Well, I guess she’s been through a lot. She misses her kids.”

Suddenly, El brightened. “I could bring Will here!”

His heart sank. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. He might not even be able to see her and it will just hurt her more. And even if he can…”

Her face drooped. “I just want to make her happy,” she said, and his heart broke. For both of them - Joyce whose life was a real, literal tragedy, and El whose childhood hadn’t been a childhood at all yet she still found it within herself to be kind.

“I know you do, kid. How about we think of something else? What does she like?”

A pause.

“Reading. Books. Old books, not comic books like Mike and Will and Dustin and Lucas read.”

Huh. He should have known, judging by that Dickens. “Anything else?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe flowers? Mike said girls like flowers.”

He nearly choked on his coffee. “What does Mike know about girls? Surely you know better than he does.”

El was oblivious. “I like flowers. They’re pretty. Are you going to plant some, in the yard?”

He shrugged. That was the plan, but of course he’d been rather preoccupied lately. “You know what, if you help me out, we can plant some this weekend. Maybe that would make her happy, right? Since this used to be her yard?”

She gave a decisive nod. So it was settled. And privately, he thought about buying some books too.

\--

According to her file, Joyce Byers’ last day went like this:

She woke up in an empty bed (Lonnie was sleeping off the previous night in the drunk tank) and didn’t stop for breakfast, only kissing her sons on the cheek before heading to work. Eight-eleven she arrived there, and got chewed out by her boss, Donald Melvald, for being eleven minutes late. She spent the next four hours stacking shelves before having a very public fight with Lonnie, now out of the drunk tank and blindingly hungover, which was witnessed by three customers and Melvald himself. When Lonnie had stormed off, Melvald told her to go home and cool off, which she’d accepted in apparently high dudgeon and driven off down the street in her little green car, the last time she was ever seen alive.

Will, so the report said, didn’t turn up to fourth period, but when questioned he mumbled something about disliking Math and was left alone. Maybe there was more to the story - maybe he just didn’t like Math. Hopper’s predecessor clearly hadn’t thought it worth the trouble. Any of it - not even Lonnie’s obvious guilt which was staring them all right in the fucking face.

It made Hopper burn with anger.

He had to find out where Joyce had gone after leaving work. Did she go straight home? Did she go to a diner, a bar? Did she visit Will at school and take him out of class?

It occurred to him, all at once, that maybe she’d finally snapped. Thought, _enough is enough_. Grabbed her kids and her cash and planned to make a run for it, once and for all. Only she never got that far. Maybe Lonnie surprised her, caught her in the act. Smashed her head in with his sole thought being that if he couldn’t have her, no one could.

His first visit was to the middle school.

He drove El in that morning, although there was a standing offer from Mike to cycle her in. It was cute, he supposed. If his daughter was a normal girl. But she wasn’t, so he had to treat this interest with suspicion. Maybe when she had her own bike she could cycle with them. He’d have to teach her to ride it, wouldn’t he? Unbidden, stinging tears came into his eyes as he clutched the steering wheel. Sara had been a precocious cyclist, training wheels gone in a month. So fast he’d almost missed it.

Across the parking lot as they were getting out of the car two familiar faces made him stop in his tracks. One of them, the older one, leaning out of his car window, was the boy from the polaroid under the floor - Jonathan. He looked pretty much unchanged, only less happy and free. Even more the sullen teen.

The other kid looked so much like Joyce that Hopper’s heart constricted, and he had to look away. He, too, looked sad. It was unsurprising, really. Hopper watched as, after a brief kiss on the cheek that left him warm, El ran over to them and soon after Jonathan drove off, no doubt heading to his own school.

Will noticeably brightened at El’s approach, but Hopper still found himself eyeing the kid carefully. Looking for signs - bruises, maybe a handprint on the cheek. It wasn’t far out of the realm of possibility, not at all. Maybe he’d have to talk to the kid. He seemed more open than Jonathan would be.

But that wasn’t what he was here for, not today. He locked the car and headed down the corridor to the principal’s office, feeling with a touch of chagrin like a teenager himself. He didn’t wait for an invitation, just walked straight in with his badge held aloft, and the woman jumped up.

“Officer. How can I help you?”

“Chief,” he reminded her, and folded himself into a chair without being asked. It was uncomfortably small. “I wanna talk to you about Joyce Byers.”

The principal - Principal Anderson, he noted from the plaque on her desk - sharpened with interest as she too sat down. “I thought they shelved that case.”

“She was never found. I don’t like to shelve cases that haven’t been closed.”

“What would you like to know?”

“How’s Will been lately? Y’know, now that he’s living with Lonnie.” It wasn’t technically relevant - wouldn’t do anything except strengthen his existing suspicions - but he had to know. He had to help these poor kids. Just like he helped El.

She shrugged. “He’s doing as well as can be expected, poor thing. There have been a few issues with him skipping class, but it’s natural to want to act out after something like this.”

“Yeah, but that started before Joyce went missing, didn’t it?”

She hesitated. “There were some issues with… well, some of the other kids. Bullying him and his friends. We tried to put a stop to it as best we could but- you know, at this age. It’s hard.”

“Harder for the victims,” he muttered. So- what. Will had gone home upset? Or gone somewhere, at least. “On the day Joyce went missing, Will skipped fourth period, right?” She nodded. “Did he come back to school that day?”

She shook her head. “No, we didn’t see him again until- well, until the investigation was winding down. As you can imagine, he was too upset to come to school. His brother too, up at the high school. You know, there have been some problems with him? He was always such a sweet boy in middle school but now he’s been getting into fights, skipping school for days at a time-”

“Do you know where they’re living?” he interrupted, mind already racing miles ahead. He wasn’t gonna talk to Lonnie, not yet, not while he didn’t have any evidence, but maybe he could talk to Jonathan.

“I’m not supposed to give that out-”

He shook his head, already changing his mind. “I can find it myself,” he said as he stood up to leave, but that wasn’t his intention anymore. He’d find Jonathan at the high school instead, where there was no danger of Lonnie interrupting. Maybe the kid would talk freely there.

He didn’t say thank you on his way out. He wasn’t sure he liked the woman - her approach to the kids she was supposed to be supporting was bureaucratic at best. The fact that El was now under her charge - well. Parents’ evening might be interesting.

The principal at the high school was different, bowing and scraping to the badge on Hopper’s chest, eager to please in the extreme. Hopper didn’t like him - not exactly a rare occurrence - but he showed him the way to Jonathan’s class sure enough. Interrupted with a cough and drew the boy out, scowling.

“Jonathan Byers?” Hopper said, stepping forward, though he was already sure.

The kid nodded. “What do you want?”

Hopper looked pointedly at the principal. “Can you give us a minute?”

The man ducked away and he stepped closer to Jonathan, eyes narrowed. “Kid, I’m here to talk to you about your mom.”

“Mom?” He looked suddenly unbearably sad and hostile all at once. “Why?”

“I’m looking into her case. You know I’m the new Chief here, right? Going through the cold cases is part of the job.” It was only half a lie.

“Okay.” He still seemed wary. “What did you wanna know? I already told you guys everything- and it’s not like you listen, I’ve been in about Lonnie like ten times already-”

“I know, kid, okay? I know. But I’m here now. I’m listening. I wanna know what you think.”

“What I think?” Jonathan scoffed. “I think Lonnie finally murdered her once and for-fucking-all and ruined all our lives because of it.”

Hopper swallowed. Sure, it was he’d expected, but he hadn’t anticipated the kid’s callous tone. He really, really hated his dad, didn’t he? “Why?”

“Why? Because he treated her like shit. Will and me too, but her worst of all. I told your guys she ended up in the hospital, didn’t you get the report? He broke three ribs and gave her concussion. Could have punctured a lung, the nurse told me. She could have fucking _died_.”

“So you think that’s what happened? He killed her and buried the evidence?”

Jonathan looked at the floor, and it struck Hopper that he was trying not to cry. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I think. I mean, he’s not that smart, but he could surprise us. The asshole’s got some tricks up his sleeve.”

“And how is he treating you?” Hopper let his voice grow soft. “You and Will? I know you’re living with him - that can’t be great, right?”

The kid laughed humorlessly. “No, it’s not great. He doesn’t really hit us - I mean, he’s hit me a few times, but it’s nothing serious. He’s awful to Will, though. Keeps calling him-” he lowered his voice, glancing around the corridor “- _fag_. And he won’t let me work but we can’t afford lunch on his pitiful fucking allowance-” He stopped. Visibly composed himself. “I work anyway. I got a job at a theatre downtown. But some of my shifts are in school hours, so I miss class, and then they’re threatening to suspend me-”

“They’re not gonna suspend you, kid. I won’t let them.”

For the first time he looked relieved, grateful, even hopeful. But all he said was “Thanks,” sullenly, like he couldn’t quite believe his luck.

“Kid.” Hopper grasped him by the shoulder, a little harder than was maybe necessary, but he couldn’t help but feel like this kid needed to know he wasn’t alone. “I’m gonna get him, okay? If your dad really killed your mom, then I’m gonna nail that fucking bastard tight. And if he didn’t, I’ll find whoever did. I’m gonna solve this, alright? Your mom-” Suddenly his throat felt tight. “I’ll find her. I’ll find your mom.” The fact of her being no more than a corpse was unspoken - and yet she wasn’t, was she? She was alive but not, right there in Hopper’s house, and Jonathan didn’t know anything about it at all.

\--

Hopper planted seven sunshine-yellow zinnia plants in the yard, arranged so when you looked from the street the house seemed to be overflowing with color and life. Flo had advised him on what to buy, but she’d told him he was cheating by getting them already flowering. He should sow them in spring, she said, to see results in August. He’d ignored her because his daughter wanted flowers now, goddamnit.

He stepped back to admire his handiwork as El came up the drive, tailed by a girl with fiery red hair. “This is Max,” El said, and then, “Wow.”

“Looks good, huh? Maybe I should give up policing and become a gardener.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” Max said, pointing out the trail of soil left on the doorstep, and El burst out laughing.

Hopper glared. The kid was bold, he’d give her that. And anyone who could make his daughter laugh like that scored high in his book. But still. “For that, you two are going to the store to get me some donuts.”

El pouted. “We just got here.”

“Go.” Reluctantly they turned away, and he hurried after them to press a grubby bill into her hand. “Get yourself something too. And some milk! We’re almost out!” But they were probably out of earshot by then.

With a sigh, he turned back to the house and headed inside, mopping his brow with a grimy wrist. It was hot in the house, ridiculously so. He wondered how on earth he could keep it cool. Then he supposed he had a pretty helpful guide already on hand.

“Joyce?” He waited in silence for a moment, then tried again. “Joyce?” There was no response. She was probably just away, wherever the hell she went. He did his best to ignore the customary shiver of unease.

He showered off the dirt he’d somehow managed to cover himself in and then, since she apparently wasn’t here, sat down at the kitchen table to look over the books he’d bought. Only four - he wasn’t made of money - and he’d had to guess at what she might like. It wasn’t like he could really ask the woman at the store. He could only imagine how that conversation might go.

_“Hi, I’m looking for some books to give as a gift.”_

_“Oh? What sort of age range are you looking for?”_

_“Thirty-five to forty. She’s dead. Oh, and she likes Dickens.”_

So he’d had to make his best estimation, by the other books he’d found under the floorboards. There was none of the crime thriller crap that he spent his time reading, if he had time to read at all. No, this shit was highbrow. He’d bought another Dickens, which was almost as thick as it was tall, along with some recent book by Vonnegut and two by some Russian author whose name he wasn’t even going to try to pronounce. (They were in english, though. He’d checked.)

He debated wrapping them up, but quickly decided against it. If holding a cigarette cost her too much energy, tearing wrapping paper might make her leave for good.

“Don’t tell me you’re gonna start reading.”

He turned, slowly, because he knew who he’d find. He smiled at her, and she smiled back. “Actually- well- they’re for you.”

“For me?” Joyce’s eyes widened. “Why?”

Then he was stumped. What was he supposed to say? Why had he bought these, really? It wasn’t just because El wanted him to, he knew that much. Maybe it was because he liked to see her smile. “El thinks you’re sad.”

She let out a short, surprised laugh. “She’s right.” She stepped closer, tracing an intangible hand over the covers. “Nabokov?”

He shrugged. _So that was how you said it._ “Just a guess. You got me right, I don’t read.”

“No, it’s good. Thank you.” Her voice was heartfelt, carrying more emotion than maybe he’d expected. “Seriously, I-” She stopped. “I can’t remember the last time anyone did- well, _anything_ for me.”

He had to clench his fists by his sides to stop himself from reaching out for her. It wouldn’t do any good, would it? And it would just be an awful, morbid reminder to them both. So he pressed on. “Did you see the yard?”

“What did you do to the yard?” There was humor in her voice, like she expected him to have trashed it. Maybe that wasn’t unreasonable.

“Come and see.” He led her out of the house, onto the porch where the flowers were visible in full bloom like the sun rising from within the ground. Joyce didn’t say anything for a long moment. She stared silently and he felt suddenly afraid that he’d offended her, overstepped somehow. This was her yard after all. Maybe she didn’t want it tampered with.

And then she turned and flung her arms around him.

It was a cold, empty embrace. She was pressed up close against him but there was no contact, no warmth. He could see her arms but he couldn’t feel them, and his own came up to clutch at a waist that wasn’t really there. She nestled into him like a phantom limb. So close to being there with him that it hurt, because she wasn’t. She could never be.

“Thank you,” she said again. Whispered into his shirt.

He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. He was overwhelmed by this - the fragile intimacy of it all, the distance between them that meant she may as well be another solar system’s star.

After a while she stepped back. Smiled at him, and were those tears in her eyes? “Sorry,” she said. “I know that must’ve been weird.”

“Joyce-” he started, but at that moment El and Max appeared and ran up to the porch, laden with donuts and chips and a carton of milk. El slowed, staring at Joyce with the most tender smile he’d ever seen, but Max hurried on oblivious. “She can’t see you, right?”

Joyce shook her head as El too went inside. “I don’t know how it works. I can appear to some people, but they have to choose to see me too. It- well, it really fucking sucks.”

“That’s why you haven’t mentioned Will or Jonathan, isn’t it? That’s why you don’t want them to come here. Otherwise you would have asked.”

He spoke lowly, but still she flinched. Her face was full of pain. “Yeah. Because if they came- and they couldn’t even see me-” She swallowed. “It would break me, Hopper. You think I’m broken already?” She laughed humorlessly.

“Joyce-” he interrupted, hand reaching out to catch her wrist but finding only empty air. “You’re not broken.”

“No?” She bit her lip, looked up at him bitterly. “How do you know?”

The zinnias danced in the wind as she turned away from him, and then she was gone.

\--

He came home from a particularly boring Saturday shift to the house redolent of baking - a warm, sweet, marzipan smell that made his mouth water. He dropped his boots and his hat and his keys by the door before heading straight to the kitchen, in the hope that there’d be at the very least some batter to taste.

He found El and Joyce there together, El dancing around to some sixties song that was playing on the radio, Joyce watching with her widest smile yet from her perch on the counter. “Dad!” El greeted with a grin, waving a wooden spoon in his face. “We’re baking!”

“Are you indeed?” he said, moving to the counter to inspect the empty mixing bowl. “What’re you making?”

“The very best apple dessert cake,” Joyce proclaimed, as if reading off the title of a recipe. “Old family favorite. My mom got it from her mom, and so on and so on.”

He used a finger to swipe up some leftover batter from the side of the bowl and licked it thoughtfully. “Damn, that’s good.”

“You sound surprised,” Joyce said. It came to his attention that even sitting on the counter she was still an inch shorter than him. “I don’t blame you, I’m a terrible cook. This is really the only thing I could ever make.”

He hummed along to the music as El went over to the stove, peering in anxiously at the baking cake. “Sorry,” Joyce said suddenly, quietly, “if I’m overstepping or anything-”

“You’re not.” He looked into her dark, permanently sad eyes. “Seriously, whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. I don’t think I’ve seen her this excited- well, ever.”

She gave a small, earnest smile, then looked past him to El. “How’s it looking?”

“Good. When do we take it out?”

“When it’s risen, and golden brown on top.”

“So now, then.” Hopper went over and helped El take it out of the stove, wincing at the heat. They set it on the countertop and he took out a skewer, letting her slide it in to check if it was cooked. When it came out clean she beamed.

“And there you have it,” Joyce said, coming over to join them. She slid close to him, too close, and he tried not to shiver as her hand passed through his. “The very best apple dessert cake.”

El reached out to taste it and Joyce held up a hand. “Hey, we gotta leave it to cool, remember?” Chastised, the girl nodded and moved away. Joyce met his eyes, amusement dancing in her gaze, and said quietly, “Will used to do exactly the same.”

“Does it hurt?” he asked suddenly, and then cursed himself. He of all people knew that it hurt.

“What?”

He was forced to continue. “Being around her- in this house- sharing your goddamn cake recipe-”

Her gaze didn’t waver. “Yes,” she said. “But it’s all I have.”

He couldn’t fault her answer. Couldn’t have put it better himself, if someone had asked him why he took in El. She was all they had, each of them. The best part of their tragic fucking lives.

Half an hour later they cut the cake and Hopper and El each had a slice. It was good, really good, and he had to respect both El’s baking skills and Joyce’s memory for the recipe. El had hers with custard, and left a smear of it on her chin. Joyce reached out as if to wipe it away, but instead just told her _sweetie, you’ve got custard on your chin._

El smudged it away, laughing, and Hopper watched them both with an alien fondness brimming in his chest.

They lived in these halcyon days for weeks, as summer drew to a sticky close and El grew more and more comfortable at school. Hopper would do a day’s work, and come home to find Joyce and El on the couch watching TV, or else at the kitchen table doing El’s homework together, or playing board games they’d found god knows where. He’d make dinner while they did so, humming along to the radio, and they’d all sit down together while he and El ate it. And then El would go to bed, and he and Joyce would sit up for hours - sometimes talking, sometimes not. The silences were the most intimate of all. He found himself reflecting, one idle morning at his desk, that if he were sleeping with her he’d feel far less close to her.

It was a strange thought. Not least because he’d thought about sleeping with her at least a dozen times. It was strange because already he felt like he’d known her half his life, not a mere few months. Already he felt like he knew her better than he ever knew Diane. And he didn’t want to erase that life - really he didn’t, because it would mean erasing Sara, and he’d die before he did that - but somehow the scars on his heart were healing. The hole in his chest was closing up.

He’d been living his life like he was dead, and it had taken someone who actually was to show him he wasn’t.

He wasn’t making much progress on her case, however. He still had to talk to Lonnie, still had to talk to Will. He wanted to talk to Donald Melvald, too, but rumor was he’d packed up and left town. Moved to Chicago or somewhere where if his employees disappeared it wouldn’t create such a business-wounding stir.

And some part of Hopper couldn’t reconcile the awful, painful case file with the woman he shared his house with. Couldn’t bring himself to imagine her corpse, where it might be buried or abandoned at the bottom of the river, when she was the source of his daughter’s smiles most of the time. And his own, if he was honest. She was brilliantly funny, despite the sadness that hung around her like a cloud.

So maybe he was making slow progress. Maybe he didn’t want to shatter the fragile peace they’d found with yet more pain.

(Deep down he knew there’d never be peace, and they’d never be free of pain, not while Joyce’s spirit clung onto the house and the memory of her children. Not while none of them knew the truth, and not while Lonnie hadn’t been brought to justice.)

But at the end of the day he didn’t have to do anything, because it came to him. He was putting up a mirror on the wall in the front room when the door opened and his daughter came bounding in, accompanied by none other than Will Byers.

The kid looked fragile, nervous as he glanced around the house. Hopper couldn’t blame him. What the hell was she thinking, bringing him here? It could only be traumatic, for all of them. It could be the very thing that shattered their halcyon days.

“Hey, kid,” Hopper said, setting down the hammer and stepping forward. Voice carefully neutral. “You okay?”

He nodded, still pale. “Thanks for letting me come over.”

Hopper didn’t tell him that El hadn’t asked for permission. Will was polite, politer than Jonathan. A sweet kid, he could tell. Maybe he got it from Joyce. (Though Joyce was far from polite.)

And then he felt it. A presence, behind him. He’d grown used to it, these past few months. Grown so used to it he could almost sense her before she arrived. He knew she was there without turning around. Knew there would be tears filling her eyes, tears that would begin to fall as Will brushed past her without seeing.

He heard her choked sob. Turned to offer comfort - whatever poor comfort he could give - but she was gone.

For the first time in a while he wondered if she was going to come back.

She did, though. After Will and El were in bed (the kid was staying over, and Hopper was damned if he knew how that had happened), satisfied after eating pizza and drawing together all night, Hopper came into his room and was halfway through taking his shirt off when he realised he wasn’t alone.

Joyce was sitting on his bed (or was it really hers?), head in her hands. Posture so defeated in the trickle of moonlight that he had to take a moment, because for a second - just a second - it was Diane all over again. Weeping on their bed the night after Sara-

He went forward, banishing Sara and Diane from his mind. “Joyce,” he whispered. He didn’t know what to say.

Slowly, she looked up at him. Her eyes were red and swollen, hair in a curtain that shadowed her face. Shoulders trembling under that thick sweater she’d been wearing all this time.

He knelt before her, wishing more than anything that he could take her hands. “Joyce-” he started, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. She wouldn’t look at him, and all he felt was helpless. So he stood up, and kicked his shoes off, and slowly - like he might startle her off - he climbed into the bed beside her. Lay down with his back to the wall, facing her.

And slowly, tentatively, she lay down too, until they were nose to nose and eye to eye with less than an inch between them. He couldn’t feel her breaths on his skin, but for once he didn’t mind. He was used to it.

“I’m gonna tell you-” he took a deep breath “-about Sara.”

“Hop-”

“Please, just let me finish. Sara was- she was my little girl. My daughter. Me and Diane - she was the light of our lives. The best thing that ever happened to us. To either of us. We had such a great time, living in New York, going to the zoo, the aquarium, the museums, the park. Even went to Broadway once or twice. She was such a great kid, Joyce. So smart, so funny, but kind, too. The biggest damn heart you’ve ever seen. She’d never let another kid feel lonely, or sad, not if she could help it. She made friends with every single kid in that damn ward by the end.”

He felt rather than saw Joyce frowning in the dark.

“Ward, yeah. She got sick. At first we didn’t know what it was. We thought it might be flu, we gave her medicines, but nothing seemed to work. She wouldn’t get better. We took her to all these specialists and they told us- they told us cancer, only we wouldn’t believe them. _I_ wouldn’t believe them. I dragged her to so many different places- all over the state- because I thought that maybe there was a chance- if they were wrong-”

“But they weren’t wrong,” Joyce whispered. Her tears had stopped.

“They weren’t wrong,” he repeated. “And god, I regret what I did to her so much. I ruined her last few years- we could have spent them together, could’ve spent them doing all the things she loved- could’ve gone to Canada, fuck, we planned to go camping in Canada together- but it was too late. She got too sick by the end to do anything, to go anywhere, and I’d wasted what time she had with stupid denial.”

“What are you saying?” Her voice was hoarse.

“I’m saying that I get it. Joyce, I get it. I know what it’s like to feel like you’re failing your kids.”

“I don’t-“ she started, then just looked at him miserably. “What am I supposed to, Hopper? How the fuck do you live with it? How does anyone?”

“We don’t,” he said softly, stroking a feather-light hand over her immaterial cheek, “but somehow we go on anyway.”

She sobbed into his pillow most of the night, while he pretended like just being there was comfort enough. It wasn’t, for either of them, but it was all he could offer. He dreamed that he was holding her in his arms, pressing a gentle kiss into her hair, letting his breathing soothe the pounding of her heart.

But when he woke, he was alone, and his arms were empty.

—

Jonathan came to pick up Will in the morning. Will emerged from El’s room bleary-eyed and hungry-looking, while El followed still wrapped in her duvet. Hopper made them Eggos topped with cream and strawberries, because he had to get fruit into them somehow.

“Feeling hungry this morning, huh?” he said, as Will tore into it ravenously.

The kid nodded, and spoke with his mouth full. “We never have breakfast at home, unless Jonathan can afford to buy eggs.”

Hopper’s gaze sharpened. Yet another clue that things weren’t alright. He wondered how he could help, short of handing the kid a stack of bills right here and now. No doubt he’d refuse to take it. So he made a decision. “El, go put your duvet back and comb your hair.”

“But-”

“ _Go_ ,” he said, in no uncertain terms. She trooped off, sulking, and Hopper turned back to look at Will. “Kid, I don’t know if your brother told you-”

“You’re looking into what happened to Mom. Yeah, I know. He told me.” Will’s gaze was fixed on his plate.

“What else he tell you? Did he say anything about Lonnie?”

“What? No.” He finally looked up, eyes wide. “You don’t think-”

“It’s just a possibility.” It was more than that. “I heard he wasn’t very nice to your Mom, some of the time.”

Will looked white as a sheet. He kept glancing around, like someone might come in and drag him away if he dared to speak a word against his father. It make Hopper’s stomach turn. He leaned closer over the table.

“Listen, kid. Nothing’s gonna happen to you. You’d just be telling me what I already know.”

Will bit his lip. “Did Jonathan tell you?”

Hopper nodded.

“Okay.” The kid took a deep breath. “So I guess you know about what happened on my birthday, right?”

“On your birthday?”

“Uh, I guess you don’t. I don’t know, me and Jonathan came home from school like normal and Mom was meant to be there, she said she’d make me a cake, only there was some emergency with the store and she couldn’t make it for ages. And- it was so stupid, I was so stupid- Dad came home, and I was upset, and I guess I annoyed him or whatever- he was drunk-” He sniffled, glassy-eyed. “He’s called me names and stuff before, but this was the first time I thought he’d actually hurt me. He grabbed me- but then Jonathan was there, and we ran out into the woods and hid- and when we went back-”

He had to take a breath. He was shaking, and Hopper hoped to god El had the sense not to come back too early.

“I don’t know what happened, but I guess Dad wanted to take his anger out on someone. And she was- she was bleeding- she wouldn’t wake up-”

“So you took her to the hospital,” Hopper interceded gently.

Will nodded shakily. “Dad didn’t come back for two weeks and Mom couldn’t work, not while she recovered. Jonathan worked the whole time- didn’t go to school once- and we still barely made it. And I just- it was my fault. If I’d been patient- if I hadn’t-”

“Stop,” Hopper said, taking the kid by the shoulder. It was nice to comfort someone he could touch, for once. “Will, it’s not your fault. None of it is your fault.”

“You don’t understand,” he hiccuped, looking up at him with eyes swimming with tears. “The day she disappeared- I skipped class. I came home, and something happened- something awful. It must have done. I can’t remember it.”

“You can’t remember?”

He shook his head. “I biked home, and the last thing I remember is seeing Mom’s car in the driveway. Jonathan found me in the woods, six hours later. It was raining, freezing cold, and I was sick for weeks, and Mom was gone. She was _gone_ , and I don’t remember it at all.”

Hopper stared. It sounded a little too familiar. Joyce not remembering it was one thing, but Will too? What the hell had happened?

Maybe it was just trauma. He’d heard about that - the brain repressing memories that were too painful to recall. Maybe the shock of witnessing his mom brutally murdered was too much for him. (It would be too much for anyone.) But still. It was strange, to say the least.

He opened his mouth to say something else, ask something else, but then El returned, hair significantly neater, and the moment was over. (It wasn’t that he didn’t think she could handle it - of course she could, arguably she’d been through worse - but he wasn’t sure Will would be comfortable talking about it in front of his newfound friend.)

“Can we have cake?” she asked, turning those wide eyes on him.

He raised an eyebrow. “For breakfast? Really, kid? You just had pancakes.”

“Please.”

Will, too, looked interested. Hopper guessed he deserved it after all he’d been through. With a sigh he stood up and fetched the cake, which was half-eaten already. El and Joyce had only made it the day before.

He gave them each a slice as the doorbell rang, and he went to answer it. It was Jonathan. He looked tired, and hungry.

“Here to pick up Will?” Hopper guessed. The kid nodded. “Come in. You want some breakfast? There’s cake, which they probably shouldn’t be eating, but…” Jonathan looked like he was about to refuse, but then his stomach made an audible complaint and Hopper smiled. “C’mon.”

They both sat down and Jonathan began to wolf down his slice of cake-

-before freezing, and looking at Hopper a little suspiciously. “What cake is this?” he asked, and Hopper’s heart sank. Right. Family recipe. How was he gonna explain this one?

“Apple and almond,” El chirped, oblivious. God, he really needed to talk to her about boundaries.

“Huh, that’s weird. Our mom used to make the exact same cake.” Will’s voice was quiet, but it lacked the suspicion Hopper could see in Jonathan’s face. He wasn’t sure what the kid suspected him of. It wasn’t like he could guess that his mom’s ghost had taught it to them.

“Yeah, we- uh, we found a recipe here in the house.” Hopper had always been a good liar, but somehow this was painfully difficult.

“What? But we cleared it all out-” Jonathan’s voice had a strange rasp to it, that suggested he was trying not to cry. “Did you find anything else?”

Fuck, he’d dug himself into a hole here, hadn’t he? But he couldn’t lie. They deserved whatever fragments of comfort they could get. They couldn’t have their mom, but they could have her memory.

With a sigh he went to his room and returned with the shoebox, that he’d stowed back under the carpet out of respect. He placed it carefully on the table and could scarcely meet the boys’ eyes as they inspected the contents with shaking hands. The drawing, the photo, the necklace.

“I remember when Mom took this,” Will said, clutching the polaroid tight, white-knuckled. “She was so pleased with herself, and you were so mad.”

Jonathan gave a watery laugh. “I didn’t know she kept it.”

“And her mom’s necklace. I thought she lost it years ago.” Will sniffed.

Hopper bit his lip. “Jonathan, can I talk to you for a sec?”

The kid looked at him through narrowed eyes, but they were less hostile than usual. Still brimming with unshed tears. Hopper fought the urge to hug him.

They both stood up and went out to the corridor. Hopper looked at him for a moment, silent, contemplating. This whole family deserved so much better, they really did. He reached into his pocket and took out the envelope of cash, which he’d made sure to take out of the box. He wasn’t sure it was appropriate to wave the money around in front of Will and El.

“This is yours.”

“What?” Jonathan’s voice was barely a whisper. His eyes were like saucers as he stared at it, reaching out almost unconsciously to take it. He thumbed through the bills with trembling fingers.

“Your mom left it. Hid it, in a box under the floorboards with all the other stuff. Like an emergency fund or something.”

He was quiet for a long moment, eyes wide with realisation. “She was saving to leave.”

“To leave?”

Jonathan nodded, finally tearing his eyes away from the money. “I mean, she never mentioned it, but- it makes sense. She had an aunt up near Detroit, died a couple months ago, but Mom took us to see her a few times. Never with Lonnie. I think- there was always this idea in her head that we might move there, if things ever got too bad.”

“She, uh- she came home that day. After fighting with Lonnie at the store. Do you think- you think maybe things had finally gotten too bad?”

“You mean-” Jonathan swallowed. Fresh tears sprang into his eyes. “You mean she was finally gonna leave him? We were gonna get out?”

“Maybe, kid. I don’t know. I-” He didn’t know what to say. What could he say? It only made the whole thing that much more crushing, that the end had been in sight. The light at the end of the tunnel, extinguished just as they felt like they could touch it.

He took Jonathan by the shoulder, his touch solid and (he hoped) comforting - and then the kid folded into him, trembling with violent sobs that wracked a frame too wiry for his height and age. Hopper stiffened for a moment - hugging Jonathan was altogether different from hugging El - but after a moment he let the kid sob into his shirt and he brought up his hands to soothe.

“Hey, you’re okay, kid. You’re okay.”

It struck him that aside from his mother, no one had ever held the kid like this. No one had ever offered him this comfort. He’d always had to be the strong one. Will had Jonathan, but who did Jonathan have?

After a moment the kid drew back, wiping away his tears almost angrily. “If I could find proof-”

“Proof?”

He nodded. “Proof he killed her. If I could find it, maybe- maybe you could put him away. And- we wouldn’t have to live with him anymore.”

Hopper bit the inside of his cheek. Jonathan was uniquely placed, it was true. If anyone could get his father to admit it it would be him. But he could get hurt, and Hopper couldn’t let that happen. For Joyce’s sake, if nothing else. “Kid, no. It’s too dangerous. Who knows what he’d do if he found out you were close to the truth-” He took a breath. “And anyway, he might not have done it.” Jonathan’s face blazed up with outrage and he held up a hand. “I’m not saying he didn’t - and let’s be honest, I think he did - but I’m not putting you at risk when it’s not your job. It’s mine.”

Jonathan looked at the floor. “You changed the carpet,” he whispered, half to himself.

“What d’ya think?” Hopper was quite proud of his DIY job, it was true. Carpet wasn’t the easiest thing to tear up or lay.

The kid shrugged. Then he looked up, and while his face was more composed his eyes were still horribly, heart wrenchingly sad. “Will can’t live with Lonnie much longer. I mean, I’m fine. I’m used to it. But Will- it’s constant- and he gets it at school too, those little shits are so mean-”

“I’ll sort it out, kid.” Hopper’s gaze didn’t waver. “I will.”

The cynicism was back. He quirked an eyebrow and looked away at the wallpaper, hands in his pockets (no doubt clutching the money). “Good luck with that.”

\--

Joyce didn’t come back for a while.

Hopper took to pacing the hallway, staring wistfully at the kitchen, the sofa, the zinnias dancing through the window. El would get annoyed, looking up from her book ( _David Copperfield_ , one of the ones he’d bought Joyce) with a furrowed brow. “She’ll be back,” she’d insist, looking right into the heart of him every time.

He couldn’t exactly refute her, because he didn’t know. Maybe she was right. Maybe Joyce would be back. But still - he worried. He missed her dark, sad eyes. The way she moved to hug them, and then remembered she couldn’t. (The dark sweep of her hair, the elegant curve of her neck poking out of that turtleneck.)

Work got him nowhere. It wasn’t a distraction - it was worse. He’d set up an evidence board, pinned her photo to it, drawn arrows between her and Will and Lonnie. Question marks all around.

Powell and Callahan were - to put it mildly - not big fans of the newly reopened investigation. Powell took one look at the board and scoffed, while Callahan just stared at it blankly. “But… she’s gone,” he said, and Hopper had to resist the urge to hit him.

“That’s why I’m gonna find her,” he replied. Callahan shrugged and walked off, nonplussed. And Hopper returned his gaze, ever more feverish, to the board. He couldn’t let this get away from him, he couldn’t. There had to be evidence. If Lonnie did it, there had to be some evidence, somewhere. He just had to find it.

That day he decided to go to the bar. Not to drink - though that would have been his usual pastime at this hour on this kind of day only six months prior - but to dig deeper. (He ordered a beer, true, but he barely touched it. It was lunchtime, after all.)

The bartender was a bored, unhelpful bachelor with a crucifix wound around his neck. Hopper tried to draw him into conversation several times, with little success. It was a skill all on its own, he supposed, to be able to deflect any attempt at sustained communication. In the end - well. He just got his badge out. It was easy enough from there on out.

“Chief- er, what do you want? Is there- um, is there something I can do for you?”

Hopper rubbed his temples. “Yeah, can you tell me where Joyce Byers is?” _Dead,_ he thought, but that wouldn’t be productive.

“Joyce Byers? She- she disappeared a while back. How come you’re asking me?”

“Because I happen to know that Lonnie Byers is a regular of yours. And, more to the point, he came in here the day she went missing.”

“I don’t- we get a lot of customers, Chief. I can’t remember every one on every day. When was this, again?”

“Back in January. January 27th.”

“January- uh-“

Hopper slammed a hand down on the bar, hard enough to make him jump. “If you’re even thinking about covering for him,” he said, through gritted teeth, “don’t. I will find out, and I will charge you too.”

The bartender regarded him balefully. “Fine. He was here, that day. Came in right about noon. Bitching and moaning about his wife, as per usual. Said something about her screaming at him in the store, sounded so embarrassing. He drank the afternoon away, y’know, hair of the dog. He was damn hungover to start with.”

Hopper stared. Noon? What sounded like the whole afternoon? But that didn’t make any sense. He’d come here to confirm his suspicions, not give the guy an alibi. “What would he think-” he indicated the little cross around the bartender’s neck “- of you lying to protect this asshole? Not sure God looks down too kindly on wife-beating murderers, y’know.”

The bartender looked horrified. “Chief- I swear- I’m telling you the truth. He was here all afternoon. Ordered two fingers of whiskey every fifteen minutes. I remember, ‘cause I thought I was gonna have to kick him out. I did, in the end. Turfed him out just after five.”

“No, no, no, that can’t- that can’t be what happened.” But he was sitting back, eyes dropping off into the distance. So- what. Lonnie didn’t do it? But he had to have done it. There was no other explanation. Only, Jonathan was home by five, and his mom was gone already. Joyce was gone, and maybe Lonnie didn’t do it after all.

Stomach churning, Hopper left without another word. Left his beer all but untouched. He barely saw the road as he drove home, hands clenched so tight on the steering wheel they began to cramp. Because-

If Lonnie didn’t do it, who did?

When he opened the door, he was desperate. “Joyce!” he shouted, casting his gaze about wildly. “Joyce, please!”

There was no response. He felt a chill of fear at the silence that greeted him. Not only did he feel horribly alone - because he missed her, with a constant ache - but the house felt more than a little sinister, now. Lonnie was one thing, a known element, but something else? Someone unknown?

His daughter lived in this house. He left her alone here. He trusted that she’d be safe here. What if she wasn’t?

He slumped to the floor, putting his head in his hands. He had to protect El. He hadn’t been here to protect Joyce, but El- he could keep her safe, right? He’d been losing sight of that, lately. Been focusing on Joyce, on the past, when maybe he should have been focusing on the present.

“Joyce,” he said again, no longer hoping for an answer. It was more like a prayer.

It was then that he made a decision. He stood up, trying to ease the tension permanently resident in his spine, and found his jacket. (There was a chill in the air, now, and storm clouds were looming on the horizon.) If Joyce couldn’t give him the answers he sought-

He knew someone who could.

—

To put it mildly, their meeting did not go well.

“Alright, asshole,” Hopper said, as he rounded the table and glared at the man cuffed to it. “You gonna talk to me now?”

Lonnie Byers sneered. (The effect was rather ruined by his bloodied lip.) “You can’t arrest me. I’ll sue.”

“Huh, that’s funny, because I already have. And no, you won’t.” He crossed his arms and stared the guy down. He was a fucking asshole, that was true. Hopper had knocked on his door and he’d opened it completely unsuspecting, a woman with a black eye hanging off his arm. Hopper took one look at the pair of them - at the defensiveness in the woman’s face - and moved to cuff him. (He wasn’t gonna let him hurt another poor woman, not again.) The idiot had tried to fight back, big mistake, and Hopper hadn’t felt all that bad about slugging him in the face. He smiled, even, when he saw that the woman was smiling too.

And now-

“You’re gonna tell me, nice and slowly, what happened that day. You’re gonna tell me what happened to Joyce.”

Lonnie shook his head. “You all think I did it, but I didn’t. You really think I wanted to be saddled with those fucking kids? Draining my income? Taking the food right out of my mouth? No. No way.”

“No way you didn’t do it. I know what happened, Byers. I know you put her in the hospital. You nearly killed her then.”

His eyes were wild. “But I didn’t! She was fine! It was an accident-”

Hopper scoffed. “Jesus, you’re pathetic.”

“I swear to fucking god, Hopper, I didn’t do it. Honestly, I’m not surprised you think I did. They always did take her side. But I didn’t do it. I fought with her at Melvald’s, I don’t even remember why, and then I went to the bar and loaded up on whiskey. I never saw her again. She probably ran off or something.”

Hopper stared at him for a long moment. The room was painfully silent, Lonnie staring at him almost pleadingly. He couldn’t believe it- really he couldn’t- maybe he and the bartender were in this together-

But maybe not.

And there was no way of knowing. That was the worst part- the worst fucking part-

Lonnie had an alibi, corroborated. And maybe it was a lie, but there was no way of knowing. Joyce’s case would forever be cold. It was all but over. He couldn’t believe that, he couldn’t. But maybe it was true.

He stared at Lonnie. At his arrogant fucking face. The sneer, the blood, the messy smattering of greasy stubble. Thought about the violence there, sitting there looking at him with a smirk. Violence made flesh, given eyes and a heartbeat. Lonnie may not have killed her but he may as well have done. He could have done.

The rage that flooded through him then was almost unstoppable. Like a burst of adrenaline it made his chest tighten, hands white-knuckled as they gripped the desk. Joyce- beautiful, kind Joyce- Joyce who made El smile, Joyce whose boys were the sweetest kids on earth- Joyce who deserved the world-

Lonnie had hurt her.

And Hopper could hurt him, if he so chose. He could imagine it, all too easily. Could imagine reaching across the desk and choking him until he fell, twitching, lifeless just like Joyce-

But instead he just clenched his jaw and twisted away. He stood up, and walked out, and left the scum of the earth there for someone else to deal with. He wouldn’t sink to Lonnie’s level. He refused to. What kind of man would he be then? What kind of-

(He wanted to complete that sentence, but he didn’t know how.)

It was beginning to rain as he drove home. The sky was dark with thunderous clouds and approaching dusk and the tightness in his chest wouldn’t go away. It wouldn’t go away, and he couldn’t tell if it was because Joyce was gone or because she’d turned up in the first place.

Life would be easier, certainly. Less complicated.

But Hopper had always attracted trouble. This wasn’t all that new. And Joyce was a lot more welcome than a lot of it. If only she would come _back-_

The water was coming down in sheets when he pulled into the drive, rattling against the windscreen and hammering against the porch roof. He cursed as he dashed across the open space, squinting his eyes against the lashing rain, soaked to the skin and shivering until he reached the porch and fumbled for his keys with fingers so numb they clattered to the floor, and when he looked up-

There was a figure in shadow watching him from the already-open doorway.

He stared. Slowly stood up, scarcely daring to breathe. There was a sudden bright flash - lightning - and it illuminated her hair, her clothes, her pale translucent skin. She too was soaked.

Joyce.

Just as quick she was gone, the porch falling into gloom once more, and he launched forward with desperate hands. “Joyce!” he shouted, over the deafening sound of the rain. He was alone in the dark again, though he knew he wasn’t, though he knew she was _here-_

There was another flash of light and suddenly she was there, closer this time, almost touching-

“Joyce,” he whispered, and brought his hand up to her tearstained cheek.

Still she didn’t say anything, only looked at him, as his hand moved closer and closer. He didn’t dare to touch - did he? He couldn’t bear to be disappointed. He couldn’t bear to feel nothing but air under fingers sent to wipe away her tears. He couldn’t bear the way she was looking at him-

Darkness again, and she was gone. He scarcely breathed, tense with anticipation, half-afraid she wouldn’t come back. But another crack of thunder- another burst of light-

She was there, and then she was kissing him.

Half there, and half not.

Maybe it was his imagination- maybe this whole thing was a dream- but she was _kissing him_ \- and for a moment, only a moment, he could feel the touch of her lips on his, as fleeting as the flickers of the storm. As electric. She felt warm against him despite the water running down her face, present and alive with her heart thrumming under his touch, and he reached up a hand to her neck-

And found, with the aching cold of disappointment, nothing but empty air.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and it echoed all around him. “Hop, I-”

Her words were carried off on the rainy breeze as the thunder ceased and he was left on the porch in darkness, alone.

\--

She drifted back to them over the coming months, but it wasn’t the same. First she visited once a week, then twice, then three times - until he began to relax and stop counting. She still perched on the counter, hair tucked behind her ears, hands soft and delicate in her lap, watching El make some new sweet creation. She still plucked Hopper’s cigarettes, half-smoked, from between his fingers when he least expected it, and he still watched her smoke them more than a little wistfully. (The memory of her lips, that brief hot flash of contact, still scalded him when he was least expecting it.)

But she reserved most of her smiles for El. She hovered around her like the mother that she was and- well-

Hopper didn’t mind it, exactly. He wouldn’t at all, if it didn’t come at the cost of Joyce’s affection for _him_. He wouldn’t go as far to say he was jealous, but- well- maybe he was.

It hadn’t been like this before. Before she’d had enough easy smiles to spare for the both of them. But now something had changed. Now she barely looked at him as she huffed out stolen smoke.

He let the tension fester between them. He said nothing. He didn’t want her to leave- was content with the little contact, little comfort she offered-

But at the same time it left him cold, and lonely. It left him rueing the bitter, gaping silences that echoed between the walls. It left him desperate, even, some nights, when he didn’t even know why. Desperate enough to have a beer, then two, then three, enough that he had the courage to pick up the phone and do something he hadn’t done in months.

She sounded happy, when she picked up. Busy, too. Like she had her kid in her arms and one eye on the TV and another on the stove. “Hello?” is all she said, and already he regretted this.

“Uh-” He cleared his throat. “Hey.”

“Jim?” Her voice sharpened, the background noise died. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, uh- yeah. I’m fine. Just-”

“Just what, Jim?” Did she sound tired? Tired of his bullshit, probably. He didn’t blame her.

“Just- calling. To see how you are.” A weak excuse. She could almost certainly hear the beer in his voice. But still. “How are you, Diane?”

“We’re good. Busy. You know, with Dais-” She cut herself off before she could finish what was obviously her child’s name. He winced, but not as much as he used to. Maybe he was numb - or maybe El had managed to heal that particular hole in his heart, if only a little. “We’re moving to Seattle next year, for Bill’s work. We already found a place. It’s nice.”

“Sounds nice. I’m happy for you, really.” Really, he was. He’d never felt bitter towards her, only pathetic.

“What about you? I don’t recognise the number. Are you still in Hawkins?”

He shook his head, then remembered she couldn’t see him. “No, no, we moved. Cute little town, not all that far away.”

“We?” she said, and then he had to consider whether he’d be breaking his own rules if he told her. Had to consider whether maybe the phone was bugged, whether maybe the men in lab coats would come again to take El away and do awful things to her-

But this was Diane. This was the tipsy conversation he’d had with her once a year for five years, now, and no one was listening. “Yeah, I- uh- I adopted a kid. El. She’s thirteen.” (He estimated.)

“You did? Jim- wow. That- that’s great, Jim, I’m so happy for you.” She, too, sounded genuine. It felt wrong.

“Yeah, thanks. And, uh-” He wasn’t sure what compelled him to keep talking. The beer, probably, certainly. It was stupid. It was a lie- only it wasn’t, not really. “I- um- I met someone.”

“Oh yeah?” Her voice rose in pitch, tentative and unsure.

“Yeah,” he said, doubling down on his (maybe) fiction. “I did. She- uh, she’s pretty special. We’re living together, actually.” He cringed as the words spilled from his tongue.

“Oh, Jim, that’s so great. I’m happy you’re finally happy.”

“Yeah- yeah. I am.” And it struck him suddenly, all at once, that - up until the past few weeks of cold and alienation - he was.

There was a long moment of silence. His gaze fell to the window, where a flurry of snow had begun to swirl outside. It was nearly December, he realised. They’d been here for months and months and months now. Long enough for El to speak in full sentences, long enough for his head to get fuzzy after two cans of beer. Long enough for him to think of Diane with nothing more than mild regret.

“It was nice talking to you, Diane. Have a good Christmas when it comes.”

He could feel her faint smile down the line. “You too. And, hey, maybe we could catch up sometime if you’re ever in Seattle.”

“I’d like that,” he said softly, and knew he would never take her up on it. Knew that, with the click of the disconnect tone, this chapter of his life would be forever over. New York, Diane, Sara - placed in a box and shut away for the rest of his life. The thought didn’t sting as much as once it might have.

He sat there long after she’d hung up, staring out at the swirling snow. The past was over, he’d realised that much - but what was there to look forward to? What kind of future could he have, as the man in love with a dead woman?

_In love with._

What right did he have to that? It wasn’t like it could go anywhere. It wasn’t like-

“Someone special, huh?”

Slowly, he turned, and there she was, just like he knew she would be. Sitting there on the arm of the sofa, hands twisted in her lap, a strange expression on her face. And it wasn’t like he didn’t know why.

“Joyce-”

“You know, for a moment I thought you meant someone else. That maybe you really were seeing someone, and I-” She shook her head, whatever she had been about to say dying on her lips. “But instead, you- Why do you think you have the right to-”

“Joyce, I’m sorry.”

“Bullshit you’re sorry. You’re not sorry.” She sighed, looked at the floor. When she met his gaze again her face had softened. ‘I’m not blind, you know. I’ve noticed. The way you look at me sometimes- But it’s not gonna work. You realise that, right?”

Almost unconsciously, he shifted closer. “Yeah, I do. I do, but I just wish-”

“What?” She had moved too, so close that he should have been able to feel her breath on his skin. “What do you wish?”

A moment of silence. How could he express it? How could he put it all into words? How could he capture the sheer strength of his longing, regret, grief for a woman he’d never really met? “I wish you would talk to me,” he settled on, knowing it wasn’t enough. “I wish you’d stop pushing me away.”

She bit her lip. “I have been, haven’t I? But you don’t get it, Hopper. You can still have a life. You don’t want to waste it on me.”

“Waste it? I’m not- it’s not a waste, Joyce, I-” He swallowed. The flickering lights of the muted TV cast faint shadows over her face, lit golden by the table lamp. “I told you about Sara. About the guilt. I was in this- this black hole, for so long. I was drinking, I was falling into bed with any woman who’d have me- I was a mess. But then you came along - El and you - and-“

He fell silent. Looked a little guiltily at the empty cans of beer on the table - and knew instinctively they’d be his last for a while.

“Hop,” she said. Achingly gentle. She lifted her hand to his cheek and he leaned into her intangible touch. He’d never liked the sound of his name more than when it fell from her lips. “I can’t- I can’t _save_ you, if that’s what you’re looking for. I couldn’t even save myself.”

But she had tried, though. God knows she had tried. Hopper thought of the envelope of money under the floor, the drawings, the pictures. The way she never lost faith or hope in her sons, when their father was failing her. His voice lowered to a whisper. “But you already have.”

She just looked at him mutely, huge eyes shining with tears in the flickering light. She didn’t say it - he wasn’t sure she ever would; indeed he still wasn’t sure she’d ever be convinced this wasn’t a bad idea - but he could read it on her face, in her eyes, on her lips. Maybe it was wishful thinking.

Or maybe she was in love with him too.

\--

Somehow - he didn’t know how - El had gotten wind of what had transpired between them that night. She greeted him the next morning with a glowing, wide grin and he almost forgot to tell her to brush her hair, which was tantamount to a birds’ nest. He piled her plate with eggs and toast and her smile didn’t even dip when he failed to give her a waffle - which he should have taken as a warning sign, but his own mood was too sunny to notice.

“Where’s Joyce?” she asked as she sipped her tea, voice studiously casual.

He frowned. “I don’t know. Haven’t seen her since last night.”

“Are you okay now?”

He raised his eyebrows at her over his coffee mug. “‘Okay’? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, you’ve been so- tense. Tense?” He nodded despite himself, the natural instinct to teach rising. “Tense. Because she’s- blanking you.”

 _Blanking._ That was definitely a word she got from her friends. He wasn’t sure it quite described the tension of the last few months, but- well. He supposed she had been, really. “I don’t think-”

“And now she’s not.”

He frowned. “How do you know?” he questioned, despite himself.

El’s smile was smug. “You seem happier.” There was definitely more to it than that, he thought, but he left it there. Her voice shrank, her smile faded. “Does this mean we can be a- a family?”

He exhaled slowly. Gave a small, wry, private smile. Things between him and Joyce - they weren’t fixed, certainly. They never would be, not entirely. But something had changed, that previous night. Something was different. Maybe El would get what she wanted after all. (If nothing else, he knew Joyce would go to the ends of the earth and beyond for her to be happy.)

She left for school with a bounce in her step, and for once he didn’t think it was because Mike was waiting at the end of the drive. He waved them off and began to gulp down his coffee, determined for once not to be late to work.

Then behind him, there was the soft creak of a floorboard. He knew it was her without turning around - and he didn’t. He let his gaze linger on the lawn and the flowerbed, where the zinnias had withered with October’s first frost. “Hey,” he said, voice soft.

“Hey.”

He didn’t turn, and he didn’t hear her move, but he could imagine her stepping closer, pressing her body close to his, even settling her forehead on his shoulder. She probably didn’t - but he let himself imagine. Let himself wish.

“You okay?” Her voice sounded strange, strangled. Without thinking he turned. She was hovering by his shoulder, cheek less than an inch from his arm. It struck him then, with an odd sense of clarity, that she too had been aching to touch.

He didn’t answer her question, reflected it back instead. “Are you?”

She blinked up at him owlishly and stepped back. “Yeah- I-” Her hand came up and she chewed absently on her thumbnail. He doubted she even knew she was doing it. “I don’t know, Hop, God. I don’t know. How are we supposed to-”

“So there is a we?” he interrupted, then flinched at his own callous eagerness. “I mean-”

“Yeah,” she said, voice so solemn he stared. “Yeah, I guess there is.”

Somehow it was the most natural thing in the world to smile, and to lift his fingers to just short of an inch from her cheek, and to pretend like that would forever be enough. For this brief, fragile moment, it didn’t matter that she was dead. It didn’t matter that they still didn’t know how, or why. It didn’t matter that he would grow old and she would linger on; it didn’t matter the violence they’d both faced, the losses. For one blissful moment he could pretend his hand could bridge the distance to feel the soft skin of her cheek. For one moment-

She sighed. “I wish I could touch you,” she said, and it felt almost like a guilty confession.

“So do I,” he admitted. Stared at her for a long time - too long - but for once she didn’t look away.

Finally, though, he had to break the silence. “I- um- can’t believe I’m saying this, but I gotta go. To work.”

She stepped back, looked at the floor, a flush rising on her cheeks. “Yeah, uh- of course you do. Wouldn’t want you to be late again,” she said, with a quirk of her eyebrow and a hint of her usual mischief.

He rolled his eyes at her with a half smile, and shrugged his coat on. “See you later?” he tried, tentatively.

She nodded. For once her smile was bright.

\--

He had a busy day. An attempted burglary, a fight outside the bar on Main Street, a stack of paperwork he’d somehow managed to ignore for the last three months which Flo wouldn’t let him neglect any longer. But for once in his life, he didn’t let it ruin his mood. He was floating on a cloud, far above Powell’s cynical stare or even the attempted punch thrown at him by the burglar. And - the icing on the cake - he would finish the day with El’s parent-teacher evening.

It wasn’t something he would usually look forward to. Especially when he had a healthy dislike for most of the school’s staff. But this was the first one. He’d never really got here with Sara - there had been ‘meetings’, yes, but he’d only had time to go to the important ones. The ones where they discussed plans for the future. Taking Sara out of school or leaving her in it, while she wasted away into a ghost of a girl.

He shook away these thoughts. This was El’s parent’s evening - El’s, not Sara’s. The moments when he forgot the difference were becoming fewer and fewer, and he was glad.

“Alright, I’m going,” he said to the office at large as he grabbed his coat and headed for the exit.

Flo looked up from her desk. “Have fun. Don’t forget to give that woman Sheryl Anderson a piece of your mind.”

“Whatever you say, Flo.” He grinned at her and lit a cigarette as the doors closed behind him, inhaling a snowy, smoky breath. It was a dark, still evening. Snowflakes drifted lazily in the night air. Kids’ holidays started next week, he realised. Maybe he could take El sledging, or ice skating. (Not that he was any good.) And maybe they’d come home to a warm, cozy house, where Joyce would greet them with a smile and a laugh and a “Did your Dad fall flat on his ass like I predicted?” And El would make hot chocolate and they’d all sit on the couch together, watching some shitty holiday movie, Joyce curled into his side just close enough that he could pretend she was really there.

He was meeting El at the school. For some reason they wanted the kids there, which he didn’t really get, but it wasn’t up to him. He only hoped El had been behaving herself.

Ten minutes’ icy car journey had him in the school parking lot, shoes crunching on the snowy ground, stubbing out his second (and probably not last) cigarette of the evening. It was busy, parents milling around the entrance, most of them happy little nuclear families. Two parents, two kids, perfect little picket fences for each.

He couldn’t bring himself to feel bitter, though. Not tonight.

El was waiting just inside the doors with Mike and Will. Mike looked sullen - “He hates parent-teacher night,” she explained, as she followed Hopper away from them. “And Will-”

Right. Will. Hopper stopped short and looked back at the two boys. As he watched, Karen Wheeler came over and almost dragged Mike forcibly away to where presumably his father was waiting. Will was left alone, looking more despondent than before. Head bowed, shoulders hunched, hands fidgeting by his sides. He seemed to be scanning the crowd - for who, Hopper didn’t know. He doubted Lonnie would ever turn up to something like this.

Without giving himself another second to talk himself out of it, he went back over to the kid. “Hey, you okay?”

Will blinked up at him. It was hard not to feel protective, responsible for the kid. He’d kept his promise - he’d been checking up on them regularly. The girl - the one who was clearly Lonnie’s new punching bag - hadn’t pressed charges, so he’d been forced to let him go. But Hopper stopped by at least once a week, often bringing donuts or something equally unhealthy. Jonathan had apparently taken up smoking, which Hopper didn’t really approve of, but he let the kid share his smokes while he vented his frustrations about his father. Hopper didn’t blame him.

“Yeah, I guess, I just-”

“Waiting on your dad?”

Will bit his lip and looked away, and the movement was so _Joyce_ it made Hopper’s chest ache. “I don’t even know if I want him to come, but…”

“... but it’s better to have someone, rather than standing here on your own.” Will nodded, eyes deep and sad. “How about- um- you come with us? Me and El?”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t-”

“Yeah, sure you could. Anyone gives us shit I’ll just arrest ‘em, right? I’m the Chief of Police, I can do that.”

Will laughed, and looked surprised at the sound. Hopper was flooded with relief.

And true enough, no one stopped them. He went from teacher to teacher with the two kids - neither of whom were biologically his - like he was the father of two, and no one batted an eyelid. One teacher, some new one for math, congratulated him on his kids’ “excellent progress, Mr-”

“Oh, no, I’m not-” Will started from his seat on El’s other side, voice small, tense, anxious.

“Thank you,” Hopper cut in smoothly, sending a warning look at him over El’s head. _I got this_. “It’s all them, though, really. Hard workers, aren’t ya?”

Dutifully they nodded. El was grinning - out of pride, yes, but maybe also because Will was sitting there next to her, for all intents and purposes her brother for the evening.

They nearly collided with Karen and Mike afterwards. Mike was still sullen, but his face brightened when he saw El and Will and the three of them fell to talking immediately, leaving Hopper and Karen in an awkward silence.

“So how’s it been?” she asked brightly. “Y’know, since I last saw you? It’s been a while.”

“Good, yeah, it’s been good. We’re all settled in.”

“Yeah, no, I know. El and Mike seem to be quite enamored with each other, don’t they?”

He resisted the urge to scowl. “Yeah, sure. I don’t know, aren’t they a bit young for all that?”

Karen shrugged. “You’re only young once. You gotta make the most of it, right?” Was it just him, or was there a wistful note in her voice? She blinked at him, ran a hand through her artfully tousled blonde hair.

He scoffed. “We’re not exactly old.”

He was startled when she laughed, the sound high and clear, and El looked around curiously. He really didn’t think what he’d said was that funny, but anyway. His eyes caught on Mike as he whispered furiously into El’s ear, and her face dropped. What the hell had the little bastard said? He swore-

“Jonathan!” Will called, and Hopper turned to see Jonathan at the back of the hall. Will started towards him, smiling, the frown having faded about half an hour earlier, but it was immediately apparent that something was wrong. His shoulders were tense, his whole body seemingly braced for impact.

Hopper followed Will over, opening his mouth to speak, but Jonathan beat him to it. “Chief, you gotta come- it’s Nancy’s friend-”

He frowned. He barely knew who Nancy was, had met her once, had some vague idea that she was Jonathan’s girlfriend. “What?” But the kid had already turned and walked outside, so Hopper had no choice but to follow him, out past the parking lot and down the side of the high school, which was right next door.

Nancy hurried to meet them. She looked shaky, scared, mascara streaking her cheeks and snow soaking her hair. “Chief Hopper-” she started, and broke off, bit her lip. “This is gonna sound crazy.” She looked at Jonathan. “Are you sure this is-”

“You can trust him, Nance. He’ll believe you.”

Hopper blinked at the kid’s faith in him, feeling a strange but not unwelcome glow of affection light in his chest. “What is it?”

She turned back to him, visibly taking a deep breath. “So, my friend Barb, she- uh, she’s missing. Has been missing for over a day now. And- well, at first we thought it was nothing. She likes her time alone. But she wasn’t at home, and she wasn’t at the library, and she wasn’t at the spot in the park that she likes, and then I knew something was wrong. So I came back here, to school, where I last saw her, to see if maybe-”

“To see if there was any evidence of a struggle, or something,” Jonathan supplied, voice grave. Nancy shot him a nervous look.

“And was there?” Hopper had to ask, because they’d lapsed into silence. There had to be something more to the story, because right now there was nothing unbelievable to it at all.

“No. Well, yes, but-”

Jonathan interrupted again. “Just show him, Nancy. Show him.”

“Okay!” she snapped, taking another shaky breath. She stepped closer to the wall, opened a door which previously had been hidden in shadow. Hopper followed her through it with more than a little trepidation-

And stopped stock still.

 _Oh, my god. What the_ fuck _is that?_

“What the fuck,” he said, then said it again, louder.

“Yeah,” Nancy mumbled. “We- we think it took Barb.”

He stared at it in horror, fascination, revulsion. It was a gaping, pulsing wound, torn through the brickwork, layers like flesh with rot creeping in at the edges and - as he stepped closer, transfixed - the shadows of a world glimpsed beyond. Like a mirror - no, a window. A door.

Every one of his organs dropped, then, all at once. He felt nauseous, and wondered if he’d have time to make it outside before emptying the contents of his stomach on the ground.

His daughter’s voice, ringing around him endlessly.

_“The hole is important. It’s a- a door.”_

_“A door. A door to where? The outside?”_

_“To another place. Bad place.”_

_“Bad place. Like- your bad place? With the bad men?”_

_“No. Different. It’s dark. And cold.”_ And then- _Don’t. Touch. The hole. Please. It’s the only way she can visit.”_

The only way she could visit. He’d never asked Joyce about that, had he? He’d forgotten all about it. He’d let it go, just like he’d let the hole in the wall remain shittily boarded up instead of filled and insulated and fixed with plaster. Maybe- possibly-

It was ridiculous. He felt crazy.

“You’re seeing this, right?” Nancy whispered. “I’m not losing my mind?”

“You’re not losing your mind,” he said, eyes fixed on the- the- whatever it was.

“What do you think it is?” Jonathan said, from behind him. “I mean- it’s like nothing on earth, right?”

“Like nothing on earth,” Hopper echoed. Words were beyond him, he felt.

There was a sharp intake of breath behind him and he turned despite himself - and saw El, with Will close behind her, staring fixedly at the- the thing. “What- is- that?” she said, vocal fluency temporarily lost.

“El-”

Her gaze shifted between him and Will and the thing, trailing circles between them and back again. He could tell her mind was whirring, furious thoughts racing. His own was blank. Stunned into emptiness.

“We don’t know,” Jonathan filled in for him, his own face lost.

“So you- you think your friend-”

“Barb,” Nancy supplied.

“Barb,” he allowed. “She was- what, taken? By this- thing?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I- This is where she was last seen. That asshole Tommy H was taunting her, they all like to tease her, he- I don’t know, he lured her in here somehow and then- well, that was it. She hasn’t been seen since.”

Missing. Gone without a trace. It was eerily familiar-

-And Hopper didn’t believe in coincidences. Never had. He’d been right about Joyce, about El’s imaginary friend and the house’s dead denizen being the same person. And if he already believed in ghosts-

Was anything else really that much more far fetched?

—

His sleep that night was tortured and strange. He would wake, still half-asleep, blinking in the gloom, and think that the room was full of people - and a moment later it was empty again. His dreams were dark and many, always circling that awful pulsing fleshy door. “Joyce!” he called down echoing empty corridors. She never responded.

He woke to a room still dark, despite the glaring gap in the curtains. It was seven am, he saw when he checked his watch. There was time yet for more sleep - but he was oddly alert. He couldn’t sleep now, not even if he tried.

He sat up, swung his legs out of bed, found a pair of jeans and a shirt. Stepped out of his room quietly, almost afraid of disturbing the heavy silence that had settled on the house. Something was different this morning, he knew. Not just because of what he’d seen the previous night, but because of something in the air.

(Several months of loving someone he couldn’t touch had taught him something about intuition, it seemed.)

In the kitchen he lit a cigarette and stared out at the sky, fading to a dull red glow. A bad day for weather, then, wasn’t that what they said? The snow was beginning to melt in the yard. It was turning to an ugly muddy slush, not ripe for sledging or skating at all.

“You asshole,” someone said behind him, and for the second time in twenty-four hours everything within him sank like a stone.

“Joyce,” he said, turning to face her. Her arms were crossed over her chest, her lips pinched together like she was trying not to cry.

“Really? You really-”

“What?” he asked, desperately, because he really didn’t know. After the- whatever the fuck that was last night, he couldn’t hope to work out whatever he’d done to upset her. He didn’t fucking know.

“God,” she said, shaking her head, a sigh in her voice. Like she wasn’t surprised. Like he was the latest in a long string of men to let her down. “You really- I can’t believe you. Karen? Really?”

 _Karen?_ What? He opened his mouth to respond-

But then the phone rang, shattering the silence with its unfeeling trill. He stared at Joyce for one long, fraught moment, but the phone wouldn’t wait and eventually he hurried to answer it.

“Hopper,” he said, still looking at her desperately. She met his gaze in mute, cold silence.

“Chief, this girl’s parents are here - Barbara Holland? Apparently she’s been missing for about two days? They won’t speak to anyone but you.”

He rubbed his temples. “Look, Callahan, I’m a bit busy right now-”

“Please? Chief, c’mon, they’re desperate. Besides, we gotta write up that fight and that burglary from yesterday. We’re busy too.”

He rolled his eyes. Resisted the urge to throw the phone on the floor. _We’re busy too_. That, he knew, was bullshit. The pair of them were the laziest cops he’d ever met. But- well- they were right in one respect. He had a job to do. He had to investigate whatever the fuck that was last night, and if it had something to do with Joyce-

Well, maybe it would go some way towards appeasing her for whatever he’d apparently done wrong.

The Hollands were distraught, to put it mildly. When he got to the station the first thing he saw was Flo bending over Marsha Holland with a mug of tea and a large pack of tissues, while the other woman sobbed and sobbed. Her husband was wringing his hands in the chair opposite, gaze fixed on the floor. They both looked up, however, when they saw Hopper.

“Oh, thank god!” Mrs Holland gasped, and shunted Flo to the side. “We’ve been waiting ages!”

“Yeah, uh, I’m sorry. So- uh, you’re missing your daughter?”

Mr Holland nodded. “Yes, Barbara. She never came home the night before last.”

“Nancy said she was staying at her house, but then this morning she called and said she’d lied. Why would she lie? Nancy’s such a good girl- _Barb’s_ such a good girl-” she sniffed.

“Regardless, Barb’s whereabouts are still unaccounted for the night before last,” Hopper said, lowly. He knew what it was like to lose a child.

“So- what do we do?”

He decided very rapidly not to mention the oozing, rotting wound at the side of the high school. For all he knew, it might not even be connected (but it was, of course it was, coincidences just didn’t happen like that), and he didn’t want to upset them further.

“I’ll look into it, okay? I’ll find out what happened.”

“You’ll find her?” There was altogether too much hope in Marsha Holland’s expression.

Reluctantly, he agreed. (He didn’t like to make promises he might not be able to keep.) “Yeah, I- I’ll find her.”

What he didn’t know, of course, was where the fuck he should start.

\--

His first course of action was to return to the school. Inspect the- well, whatever it was, in the cold light of day. Maybe it would seem less strange, less alarming - but somehow he doubted it. The image of that gaping wound in the brickwork was engraved on his mind.

But when he got there, dragged open the door, stepped over the scattered sports equipment none of them had noticed in the chaos of the previous night-

It had changed.

Fleshy and rotting no longer, it was just a hole. Just a hole in the wall, looking out on a barren and icy sports pitch beyond. Maybe the whole thing had been a dream - but it hadn’t. He knew it hadn’t. He’d seen it, right there in front of him.

And somehow-

This was confirming his faint, tentative, impossibly hopeful suspicions. The hole in the wall of his house was just that - a hole - but maybe it hadn’t been, once. Maybe - just maybe-

He swallowed painfully. The idea of a door - well, that was one thing. But the possibility - no, sheer improbability - that Joyce might still be-

He couldn’t consider it. He’d only just reconciled himself to the fact that a lifetime of silence, and intangibility, and merely dreaming of physical intimacy was what his future looked like. He’d squared with that. It was okay, if it meant he could have Joyce - as much as he could have her, as much as anyone could. But now…

There was nothing to be gained from standing in the storage room any longer, staring emptily out at the gaping wall. There were no other clues here, no real evidence. Just the fantastical workings of his mind, spinning it out into impossibility after impossibility.

He could imagine - if what Nancy said, believed, was true - the girl, Barb, lured in here for whatever reason. Face falling as the interaction turned sour. The asshole saying cruel things, Barb backing away into that dark corner. Retreating and retreating until she couldn’t anymore - but then she could, because the wall opened up. The wall opened and swallowed her up like quicksand - only, not so clean. It had been ragged, raw.

Maybe, if Barb was like Joyce, she was still around. He looked around him, cast his gaze about almost frantically. Because if Barb was still around, that meant-

Well, he wasn’t sure what it meant. It meant only that the two cases were so closely aligned that there had to be something more to the story. There had to be.

He had to talk to the kid. The boy who had taunted her in here. Maybe he’d seen something maybe he knew something. It was his only lead.

He had the principal drag the kid out of class, feeling rather satisfied at the sniggers and stares the boy got. It was what he deserved, surely, for treating girls like shit.

“What happened yesterday, then, huh?”

Tommy shrugged with studious indifference. “I don’t know what you mean. It was just a normal, boring day.”

“You know exactly what I mean. You must’ve heard by now. Barbara Holland? She’s missing?”

The kid was a very good liar, because he didn’t even blink. “She probably just ran off, right? Sick of this shitty little town.”

“Alright, enough of the bullshit.” Hopper straightened up, enough that he towered over him, enough that he looked threatening. He’d never hit a kid, of course - but Tommy didn’t know that. “I know you played some stupid trick on her. What are you, a middle schooler? C’mon, it’s time to act like an adult.”

Finally the smirk broke and he scowled. “Fuck you. I didn’t do anything. It was just a joke, that was all.”

“What was a joke?”

The kid’s gaze dropped to the floor. “I- well- I waited in the sports store room for her, right, it was just gonna be this silly prank, we were just gonna laugh at it at the end, but then-”

“Then what?” Hopper leaned in, interest knife-sharp.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” That had to be bullshit. It had to be.

But Tommy shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t remember what happened. We must’ve just let it go, right? The next thing I knew I was in class.”

“You don’t remember?” He felt cold. He remembered Will’s lost expression, saying _I don’t remember it at all._ But how..? This was too much of a coincidence. Too much. Joyce, and Will, and Barb, and Tommy. Something was going on here. He knew it.

“Alright, go back to class. But-“ he continued, as the kid turned to go “-if I catch you trying anything like this again, I swear to God, kid, your ass is grass.”

Tommy nodded, for once slightly chastened, and Hopper rubbed his forehead painfully. Where the hell did he go now?

—

When he got home that evening El was waiting for him, standing by the door with shoulders hunched, brimming with anxiety. “Dad!” she said, stepping forward, and in one fell swoop he realised how grown up she’d gotten.

“Hey, kid,” he said, ruffling her hair, pointedly neglecting her tension. She’d tell him in her own time.

“Dad- last night-“

He sighed. Drew her over to the sofa, sat down next to her. No doubt she was distressed, disturbed by what they’d seen. “I don’t know what it was, El. I’m working on it.”

“No,” she said, forcefully. “I do.”

“You do… what?”

“I know. What it is.”

He stared at her. Voice dropped to a whisper - “What?”

“I- I’ve seen it before. With the bad men. In Hawkins.” She swallowed visibly, her fingers curling into the cushions of the sofa. “I made it.”

_“What?”_

“I didn’t- mean to. Papa sent me to the dark place and I- somehow, I opened it. A door. Like the one at the school.”

This was too much to process all at once. Hopper closed his eyes, shook his head. “So…”

“So, maybe I can fix it.”

His words dried up. Fix it? Fix it how?

“Maybe-“

Her eyes were huge, dark and huge in her face. Her mouth curved in a slight, hopeful smile.

“Maybe I can save Joyce.”

Save her? Save her from what? Unless- “Kid, I don’t know what you’re saying, but-“ He swallowed, looked at her for a long, silent moment. She was just a kid. She didn’t know what she was saying. She couldn’t mean it, not really. She couldn’t know that she could save Joyce - could she? How could she know that Joyce wasn’t beyond saving? (And yet, wasn’t it what he had suspected for the last day at least? If not longer? Wasn’t it, in truth, what he had half hoped when it was proven Lonnie didn’t do it?)

Loving someone was hard, he thought, but it was easier when they weren’t dead. It was easier when you didn’t have to grieve for them, mourn them, on top of everything else. Mourn a physical body, when that wasn’t what mattered, but somehow it was. Somehow some element of Joyce’s soul had gone, he knew, that day in January. Besides, he’d give anything to see her smile with her boys again.

El opened her mouth to continue, but she didn’t look at him. Her eyes were glued to the floor. “If I- if I save Joyce, would you- you and Mrs Wheeler-”

Despite himself he scoffed. “Hey, what’s this about me and Mrs Wheeler, huh? First Joyce, then you-”

She regarded him a little guiltily, from behind a curtain of hair. “I told Joyce. About you and Mrs Wheeler.”

“There is no ‘me and Mrs Wheeler’.”

“But Mike said- and you were laughing-”

And there it was. Some silly misunderstanding compounded by kids watching romantic movies unsuitable for their age, absorbing ideas without any sort of correct context. El saw laughter and thought flirtation - or at least, that’s what Mike told her.

And she’d told Joyce, and Joyce-

He couldn’t blame her for reacting badly, really he couldn’t. He’d professed his devotion and now (in her mind, at least) he was flirting with another woman - her friend, no less. He couldn’t blame her.

But he had to set her right. Had to fix this, before El did whatever she was going to do and changed everything for good. He had to make this right.

“Joyce?” he called experimentally, scarcely expecting her to answer, but she did. She stepped into his field of vision slowly, cautiously, eyes not angry but nervous, afraid. Like she was going to be let down even further - and it killed him that she’d felt like that, even once, even falsely. “Hey, El?” he said softly. “D’ya mind, y’know, giving us a minute?”

She nodded, stood up with a tentative glance between them. “Okay,” she said quietly, extraneously, and then slipped past Joyce towards her room. Joyce watched her go, only turning to face Hopper when El had disappeared behind her closed door.

“Joyce,” he started, then stopped. She’d taken on a cold, closed-off posture. “Joyce, please, just- hear me out. Sit down.”

She crossed her arms over her chest, but sat down nonetheless. Her hair fell around her face in loose, dark waves, and he so desperately wanted to pull her closer. But he couldn’t, for more reasons than one.

“El said something to you about me, what, flirting with Karen Wheeler, right?” Joyce tensed and he hurried on. “But she was wrong. She was absolutely, utterly, definitively _wrong,_ Joyce, I wouldn’t do that to you. I-” He swallowed the remainder of that sentence, the words painful on his tongue. “I told you I don’t want anyone else, didn’t I?” he continued, leaning closer. “I meant it. I don’t. She saw me, what, laughing? Out of politeness? She’s a kid. And Mike- he’s a bad influence, I knew that already. He-” He sighed. “Whatever, I promise you, they were wrong. The kids were wrong.”

Finally, Joyce’s eyes met his, and he saw that they were shining with tears. “They were?”

“Of course they were. You know what I said. I wouldn’t- I wouldn’t lie. I wouldn’t.”

Her lips curved up in a tortured smile. “I’m sorry. This whole thing-” She was silent for a moment. “I knew you wouldn’t do something like that, not really. But maybe- I don’t know. I was inventing a way to push you away. Because you- you deserve better than this.”

This, again. They’d been over this. “No, Joyce, stop. No.”

“But you- you do. Anyone would. I can’t offer you anything. Even if I was alive-”

His throat constricted and for a moment he struggled to breathe - and she pressed on.

“Even if I was alive- it wasn’t all that great when I was alive, Hop. You think I’m bad now? I was a mess. I was- I was a mess.”

He shook his head, surged forward so his forehead was almost touching hers. “I don’t believe that. I don’t. And even if- even if you were, then- well- that’s okay. It’s okay, Joyce. It’s okay. You wanna know what I think? I think- I think Lonnie, that son of a bitch, he made you think you were something you’re not. He made you think you were weak, lesser somehow, when it’s just-”

She smiled at him through her tears, intangible hand finding his.

“It’s just not true,” he finished, holding her gaze. “You, Joyce - and I refuse to call you Byers, because fuck that asshole-” she laughed, suddenly, and covered her mouth with her other hand “- are the strongest woman I’ve ever met. And you- you deserve the world. I just don’t know if I can give it to you.”

“Stop it!” she cried, suddenly, and there was laughter in her voice. Perhaps the purest laughter he’d ever heard. “Just stop, God, Hop. Stop, you’re making me blush.” She smiled at him earnestly, joyously, and the last time he felt like this he was looking at Diane holding his baby girl in a fluorescent-lit hospital bed.

He still couldn’t say it, though, because if he did there would be a morbid quality to it, and he wasn’t sure it wouldn’t ruin things forever.

It was then, of course, that the phone rang. He looked at her for a long moment, more than reluctant to answer it, but he had to in the end. She was still smiling, which felt like permission. “Hello?”

“Chief, the Hollands are organising this search party right now, in the woods. I mean, it looks bad, doesn’t it, if we’re not there? We should go.”

Loath as he was to agree, if Callahan was suggesting such a thing, he had to be right, given how lazy he was. He looked regretfully at Joyce as he agreed. “Okay, fine. Where are they right now?”

Callahan reeled off an address. Hopper could be there in ten minutes, if he left now. When he hung up, he had to resist the urge to sling an arm around Joyce’s waist and kiss her goodbye. That wasn’t a thing they did - could do - but it would feel more than natural.

Instead he smiled at her apologetically as he grabbed his coat. “Sorry, I gotta go. Search party.”

“You will find that girl, won’t you?” Joyce’s voice was solemn, and he nodded.

“If she can be found, I’ll find her.” It was the best he could do, and a far more realistic promise than what he’d given the Hollands. She nodded, and waved him off as he headed back out into the darkening twilight, trusting her to tell El where he’d gone. Somehow - without him even noticing - she’d become a co-parent, like a load-bearing wall without whom the whole house would come tumbling down.

\--

It began to snow again when they were out in the woods. It settled on the ground, in the trees, in his hair. It was the worst possible night to be out looking for someone, alive or dead. The snow deadened the sound of their voices turning hoarse with shouting, and it covered up any tracks, snapped branches, blood. It would be a lost cause whether Barb was out here or not.

But the Hollands were desperate. (And he knew how that felt.)

So he continued on with them in the dark and the cold, the flashlight wet and flickering in his grip. If he wasn’t so preoccupied with what he’d left behind in town - El, and Joyce, and all the questions that came with her - he might’ve been more than a little uneasy. There was an eerie quiet hanging over the bushes, the trees, the searchers spread out across the woods.

Ahead of him he glimpsed Nancy and Jonathan, and unconsciously he picked up his pace. Listened in on their hushed voices without really meaning to.

“-both know we’re not gonna find her out here,” Nancy was saying. Her words were scornful but her tone was tremulous, afraid.

“We don’t know that, though. Think about it, Nance, I mean- what we saw-” This was Jonathan, ever the cynic.

“It’s crazy, I know. I mean, you’re right, it’s not something we can find in textbooks or journals or newspapers but- doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.”

“I’m not saying it wasn’t real. I’m just saying maybe there’s another explanation.”

Six months ago Hopper would’ve been inclined to agree with Jonathan. But now- after all he’d seen- after El, and Joyce, and the ragged wound in the wall-

Nothing was out of bounds. Nothing was too extraordinary, and it was as he thought this that a real hope began to blossom in his chest. Maybe - just maybe - El could do it. El could save Joyce, bring her back, and then they could all start living again. Jonathan and Will too. Hopper wouldn’t have to keep this awful secret that crushed his chest whenever he was around them.

He hoped. God, he hoped-

“Holy shit.” Jonathan’s hissed exclamation broke through his thoughts and he looked up, alarmed. The kid was staring at a tree a few yards away, Nancy already leaning down to inspect it with her flashlight. “Is that-”

“Yeah,” she said, voice small and constricted, and Hopper stepped forward.

At the base of the tree was another gaping, ragged, rotting wound. Just the same as the one at the school, only smaller, shining wetly in the gloom. He grimaced as he crouched down before it, half out of disgust and half out of horror. Something was _wrong_ here, he knew it. He knew it.

“Nancy, we’re not- we’re not that far from school, you know. What if Barb…” Jonathan’s voice was tentative, unsure. He glanced at Hopper as if for support.

Nancy nodded, but she wasn’t looking at him. “What if-” she started, then hesitated. “What if- on the other side of these _things-”_

“You wanna go through it?” Hopper asked, incredulous at himself for even entertaining the suggestion. But then again - it had to be possible. El referred to them as doors, and you couldn’t have a door leading to nowhere.

“That can’t be safe,” Jonathan argued, but she was already shrugging off her backpack and tying her hair up tighter.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, though her eyes were wide with fear.

He couldn’t let this happen. This was a kid. He couldn’t let another kid be the victim of this- whatever this was. “No, it should be me,” Hopper said.

Both of the teenagers shook their heads. “You’re not gonna fit,” Nancy said. “Jonathan wouldn’t fit either, look.” And indeed, she was right. The rotten gap in the bark would in no way accommodate the breadth of his shoulders.

He clenched his jaw and opened his mouth to argue further, but it was pointless. She was already crawling inside. Her stiff back brushed the upper rim of the door and he cringed at how tight it was - but then her boots disappeared and she was through, leaving him and Jonathan staring helplessly after her.

After five minutes of silent snowfall in the dark Jonathan began to pace, mumbling under his breath. “This isn’t safe. This isn’t fucking safe, is it? What if- what if-”

“Jonathan,” Hopper said warningly.

“What?” The kid whipped around and snarled at him: “Why did you let her do that? Why would you- What if something happens? What if- What if I lose her, I can’t lose her, I can’t lose her too-”

Hopper’s heart sank in horrible understanding. Carefully he gripped the boy’s shoulders and stared him down. “You’re not gonna lose her, okay?”

“But I’m meant to take care of her. I’m meant to take care of her and now I’m gonna lose her, just like I lost Mom because I wasn’t there, because I didn’t protect her-”

“Jonathan! It wasn’t your fault.”

“But it was. _It was_. You- you don’t get it. You can’t understand. I-” He sucked in a breath. “I may as well have killed her! I wasn’t there, I let Lonnie do that to her, I let him kill her-”

“ _No one killed her_ , okay?” It came out in a rush before Hopper could think, and he swallowed as the kid stared at him.

“What?” he croaked. Hopper estimated he had about ten seconds before Jonathan realised exactly what he’d said and he had to have an explanation ready, something that wasn’t _I met your mom’s ghost but she’s not a ghost, not really, and now I think my daughter who has psychic powers can save her from the alternate dimension your girlfriend’s friend is trapped in too._

But he was saved by a sound from within the gate - Nancy’s scream. “Jonathan!” she cried, and they both scrambled to their knees by the tree. Hopper tore at the bark of the tree, an attempt to make the gap wider, wide enough for him to fit (because there was no way in hell he was letting two teenagers go in there alone. One was bad enough. And especially not Joyce’s son). Jonathan, too, was clawing at it with his hands, which soon became bloody and raw.

Finally Hopper stood up. “Stand back,” he said, drawing his gun, and used the solid grip as a sort of hammer. Chunks of bark broke away, revealing more of that fleshy membrane. He examined it apprehensively. It would be a tight squeeze, but it would have to do.

He dropped to his knees.

“Wait-“ Jonathan started, but Hopper wasn’t having any of it.

“No, you’re waiting here, and getting help if I don’t come back. Okay?” he said, so forcefully that the kid was startled into nodding.

Then he muscled his way through the gap.

The other side was so similar that for a moment he thought he’d simply gone through the tree and out the back - but there was something strange about it. A heavy, draining quality to the air. A faint blue haze cloaked everything. And what he’d first thought was snow drifting down was, when he looked closer, more like the spores of a fungus.

His flashlight, which had already been flickering, sputtered and died in his hand. He scoured the murky gloom desperately. “Nancy!” he shouted, taking a step forward. “Nancy!”

“Hopper!” came her faint, almost muffed cry. He followed her voice on trembling legs. Something about it - he wasn’t sure what - took him right back to Vietnam, to the dense, dark jungle, to the grotesque horrors he witnessed there. There was a tightness in his chest that had nothing to do with the thickness of the air.

He found her kneeling on the ground beside a mass of creeping, shadowy vines. “It’s Barb!” she said, turning to look at him, her face tear-stained and grimy. “She’s- she’s trapped under there-”

With a jolt he discerned the girl’s hand, pale, almost translucent in the dim light, among the tendrils. He dropped to his knees and tugged at them furiously, but they didn’t yield. He had a knife, he realised suddenly, and fumbled to get it out and apply it to the vines. They gave reluctantly, eerie sounds fluttering around them like the very air was in pain, but they gave. Nancy helped him drag Barb up and away from the ground, the girl coughing and spluttering weakly for breath.

He looked around them bleakly as he gave her a moment to recover. This was worse than he could have possibly imagined. For Joyce to have been trapped here- for nearly a year-

Only she hadn’t been. She’d been with them, a lot of the time. How had that worked? How-

Whatever the truth of it, he was feeling increasingly uneasy. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, and led them towards the tree. The two girls went first, as he stood with his every nerve on edge. When Nancy’s boots had once again disappeared back to the other side, the side of the living, he crouched too. Began to pull himself through the gap - but then he felt it constricting around him. Tightening around his belly, like it was trying to close, to swallow him up-

“Chief!” Someone was yelling - Jonathan - and there were hands on his arms, dragging him out, as he yelled in frustration, fear, exhaustion-

“Son of a _bitch!”_ he gritted out as he fell down into the dirt, dragging Nancy and Jonathan down with him, released only to watch as the hole closed itself up behind him. It knitted itself back together, sticky raw edges sealing up and bark springing together seamlessly. As Jonathan shone his flashlight over it, it looked as if there had never been a gap at all.

If not for the presence of Barb behind him, the grimy residue slimy on his face, and the pounding of his heart, he could almost believe he had imagined the whole thing.

“Holy shit,” Jonathan said softly, as Hopper pressed a shaking hand to the tree.

“What was that?” Barb whispered. She was slumped on the ground next to Nancy, dirty and clammy. “Could we- could we all have been trapped in there?”

But that wasn’t the question. The question for Hopper, now, was how to save Joyce from being trapped in there.

His radio crackled to life by his side. He was amazed it had survived the trip, in truth. He’d completely forgotten it. “Yeah,” he said in answer.

“Chief, you’d better come.” It was Powell, who hadn’t joined the search party, instead remaining on duty at the station in case of any new leads.

Hopper cursed. “Look, I’m actually pretty damn busy right now, so-”

“It’s your house.”

\--

He broke at least three traffic laws as he motored home, knuckles white as they gripped the wheel. El- and Joyce- they were in that house, they were _there_ , and if something had happened to them- to either of them-

He didn’t know what he’d do.

Flashing red and blue lit up the winter sky above the road ahead and he slowed the Blazer’s pace, almost afraid of what he’d find. His view of the house was obscured by a fire truck, and other vehicles parked almost randomly, basically in his driveway. He parked with his heart in his throat and hurried past the dogsbody who was unfurling a length of yellow crime scene tape.

“El!” he shouted, hands trembling. “El!”

The yard was hazy in the dark, like a cloud of smoke lay over it. And the house-

Where the house previously stood, where he’d shaped El into his daughter, met Joyce, let them both become some new sort of family to him, was a pile of rubble. Gone. Numbly he picked up a loose brick, felt it crumble slightly in his hands.

“El!” he called again, desperate. She couldn’t be- she couldn’t-

“Dad!”

He whipped around, and there she was. Smeared with dirt and bleeding from her nose but otherwise unhurt. His knees felt weak at the sight and he stumbled slightly as she launched herself into his arms. He squeezed her tight, buried his face in the crook of her neck. “Thank god you’re okay.”

“Dad-” she whispered, as she stepped back again, and he saw that her eyes were glittering with tears. “Me and Will- we tried to save her- but it didn’t work-”

He stared at her. “What?” he croaked, voice barely audible.

“Joyce. I opened the gate- but it was too strong- and the house- I couldn’t save her.”

She began to cry in earnest and he held her tighter, shushing her sobs even as he felt his own aching sense of loss well up in his heart. Because if Joyce was tied to the house-

And the house was no more-

Then she was gone.

His own vision began to blur, and as he screwed his eyes shut a tear escaped. Joyce had become everything to them, over the past six months. Joyce had become family. She couldn’t be gone, she couldn’t, not when-

Not when he-

El’s shoulders were shaking with sobs and as he looked past her he saw that Will had emerged from the dust, looking around with a lost expression on his face. Hopper swallowed more tears and gently released El, calling out to him - “Will!”

The kid approached cautiously. Hopper didn’t know what El had told him, of course. Whether he was experiencing the loss of his mom a second time - except, that would be what he was experiencing anyway. The house, the house he’d grown up in, the house where he’d seen his mom for the last ever time, had been destroyed. Of course he was upset, Joyce or no Joyce.

“Kid, I’m so sorry,” Hopper said, wincing at the way his voice was roughened by grief.

Will blinked at him for one aching, silent second, before folding into his arms with sobs of his own. Hopper held him tight, held him and El both, tried to think desperately about what the fuck they’d do now-

But then a shape emerged from the red-blue flickering fog. A shape he’d recognise anywhere, recognise beyond the grave. His heart stopped and he was sure that once and for all he was going crazy-

But it was her. Joyce.

“Will,” she said, voice barely above a whisper, but her son heard her. He turned in Hopper’s embrace, shrugged him off, and stared at his mother - because he heard her. _He heard her._

“Mom,” he breathed, and catapulted himself into her arms. She clutched at him frantically, like she was afraid one of them would melt away into dust - and that wasn’t unreasonable, not after everything, not at all. But she touched him and she held him, and she wasn’t a ghost anymore.

El was next, launching herself at her with tears still trickling down her cheeks. And the picture in front of him, of his daughter wrapped in the embrace of the only mother she’d ever known for the first time, sent his own tears racing down his cheeks.

Then, with their children looking on, she finally looked at him.

She looked different, somehow. Brighter, more whole. Maybe it was because she was alive again or maybe because she’d been reunited with her son but whatever it was - it made him want to kiss her even more than he normally did. Even more than he always wanted to.

“Joyce,” he whispers, and she stepped towards him. Walked slowly, her pace measured, her hands still by her sides. When she reached him she didn’t move for a moment, staring up at him with those huge, solemn eyes.

He didn’t dare breathe. He was afraid that if he touched her - moved his hand within even an inch of her skin - she’d crumble to ash. But she touched him. She reached up her hand and brought it to his cheek, let it hover there for a moment, unsure, before landing, gentle yet firm. “Hopper,” she breathed. He scanned her face, scarcely believing his eyes. She looked tired, a little grimy, her hair tangled around her face, her eyes shadowed with weariness, but she looked more alive than ever he’d seen her - not only literally but metaphorically too. “Hopper,” she said again, and kissed him.

It was the best kiss he’d ever had.

Not because it was elegant, or particularly sexual - in fact, halfway through as she leaned up to deepen it she stumbled over his foot and wound up knocking her teeth into his chin, causing them both to double over laughing - but because it was warm and full and felt like coming home.

And when she’d embraced her kids again, and he with her, and the flush on both their cheeks had faded from the look El and Will had given them, Jonathan arrived.

Jonathan arrived, and Hopper knew instinctively this wouldn’t be such smooth sailing.

A strange tight look came into his face at the sight of them, the four of them, all together, somewhere between tearful and horrified. His mouth opened in a silent exclamation as Nancy came up by his side. She stared at Joyce. “Isn’t that-”

Jonathan shook his head tightly. “It can’t be.”

“Jonathan-” Joyce said, stepping forward, holding out her arms to him. “This is real. It’s me, I’m here.”

He was shaking his head: “No, no, you’re dead, Lonnie killed you.”

Beside him, Hopper felt Will flinch and he dropped a comforting hand to the boy’s shoulder. “He didn’t,” Joyce said. “I know he’s an asshole, a bastard, a monster of a father, but in this - he’s innocent. He didn’t kill me, Jonathan. No one did.”

Jonathan looked at Hopper, then, eyes narrowing with suspicion. “You knew, you- how did you know?”

He just shook his head helplessly.

“Mom-” Jonathan said, voice strangled, and now he was definitely trying not to cry.

Finally, Joyce flooded forward and caught him in her arms. His shoulders began to shake as he surrendered to his sobs and Hopper looked away as she whispered soothing assurances into his hair. It couldn’t be easy for the kid, he knew. Going from such a mire of self-blame to- well- no doubt feeling lost, and frightened, like the floor had dropped from beneath his feet but he hadn’t fallen.

Later the government people arrived, led by some man named Owens who somehow knew of everything that had happened - Barb, Joyce, El. It was a miracle that he asked for no more than their silence, in return for all he gave them. A cover story for Joyce, an explanation _in terms they’ll understand_. (Hopper knew that this wouldn’t be enough, knew she’d forever be the subject of rumor and intrigue. The woman who came back to life.) A lawyer for her divorce, custody of her children. A place to stay while they found a house. House, singular. When Hopper had questioned it, introduced the plural to that phrase, it had felt so wrong on his tongue and Joyce had looked at him with such dizzying confusion that he fell silent, and never spoke of it again.

After all, Jonathan and Will had all but become his sons in the last few months anyway, and Joyce had been living with him and El for the last year anyway - ‘living’ still raising a laugh, though less bitter now, on both their lips.

Lonnie provided no real issue, save vague annoyance and a bruised fist. He made some comment, when Joyce and Hopper went to see him to finalise the (complete, comprehensive, ultimate) handover of custody - “So, you fucked my wife back to life, then, huh?” - at which Joyce just laughed disbelievingly and Hopper broke his nose, again.

Joyce. Living with Joyce was familiar, yet bizarrely different all at once - like wearing a pair of gloves when the hole in the thumb had been fixed and feeling strangely warm at the absence of the cold spot. She touched him all the time, casually, as if just to prove she could - a hand snaking down to entwine with his, her head pillowed on his shoulder whenever they sat beside each other, her body burrowing into his at any opportunity. She was tactile with her children too, hugging them when they came in from the cold like it had been years since she’d last seen them, rather than minutes. He didn’t blame her. He rather liked it, in fact - this reminder, constant and reassuring, that she was here.

That she was real.

That the last year hadn’t been a dream. That he’d met a ghost, and fallen in love with her, and somehow everything had worked out fine anyway. That his life was just gonna keep on getting weirder, and maybe he was okay with that.

\--

Christmas was upon them before they knew it. El’s excitement grew with each passing day, the cheap red advent calendar he’d bought her rapidly ticking down. Christmas wasn’t to be as big or as festive as it ever was with Diane, however. Joyce, he learned - should have guessed from that Star of David on a chain under the floor - was Jewish on her mother’s side, with the result that she had gifts but no tree growing up. It was Lonnie’s influence that made Christmas into a big deal in their house - so Hopper was more than happy to let them all fall back into a more casual holiday. (It felt like one final spit in that asshole’s face, for all of them.)

Besides, decorating the tree was always something he did with Sara and Sara alone - and he was content to let it remain in the ‘Sara’-labelled box in his life.

So no tree, because anyway El didn’t really know any better, and the boys were just happy their mom was home. ‘Home’ was a tidy three-bedroom on the edge of town - the nice edge, not quite suburbia and not quite not. It hadn’t taken them long to find it, put in a first payment, move in scattered belongings and make it look lived in. (He suspected Owens had had something to do with it, because they’d kept their word and their mouths shut.)

That Christmas Eve they were home, all five of them, draped sleepily over the furniture after his and Joyce’s best efforts at cooking. Just before ten Hopper got up for two more beers, one each for him and Joyce, and when he came back the sight made his eyes sting.

“What?” she asked. Her face was lit by the flickering grays of the television - _It’s A Wonderful Life_ was still playing at low volume, El completely absorbed in it while Will and Jonathan looked close to sleep.

He shook his head as he came back to sit beside her, draping an arm over her shoulders without a thought, her head coming to nestle in the crook of his shoulder. “I don’t know, I just-” He sighed. “I never thought I’d have this.”

She hummed into his shirt. “Neither did I.” It didn’t matter what ‘this’ was, not really. They each knew what the other meant. “But we do, right? And I think it’s time for all ‘this’ to go to bed.” She directed the last part of that at the kids, and El looked up with eyes wide in protest while Will, finally having succumbed, just let out a quiet snore.

“Come on, you don’t want to be awake when Santa comes.” Hopper winked dramatically and both kids rolled their eyes, but slowly got to their feet. Jonathan too stood up, claiming he was going to bed, but Hopper knew he’d be on the phone to Nancy for hours after they were all asleep.

“You know we don’t believe in Santa,” Will said.

“Then you won’t get any presents, will you?” Joyce was smirking and reluctantly the pair trooped off to bed, leaving her and Hopper alone before the fire.

“So,” he said, pressing a kiss into her hair. “Not a bad year, in the end?”

“Not a bad year,” she agreed, smiling at him. Her glimmering eyes held the promise of many more evenings, Christmases, years. “But the end was better than the start.”

**Author's Note:**

> and there we have it. 
> 
> let me know what you thought! xx
> 
> by the way, if you're interested, the recipe for the apple and almond cake can be found [here](http://www.maryberry.co.uk/recipes/baking/the-very-best-apple-dessert-cake). it's one of my fav things to make (especially if you add a little extra almond extract - i usually go for 4x the recipe amount lol so 2 teaspoons and it's so so good.) it uses british measurements, sorry haha. let me know if you make it and if so what you think!!


End file.
